At the Triumph Leader Museum, which houses a collection of gifts given to Saddam Hussein over the years, curators had removed things from the display cases and squirrelled them away for safekeeping, although it was doubtful how safe anything would be anywhere in Baghdad once the bombs began to fall. I went to the museum to take another look at the gun that had been used in 1920 to assassinate Colonel Gerard Leachman, a British officer who spent the First World War in the deserts of what was then Mesopotamia, leading Bedouins in skirmishes against the Ottoman Turks. By 1920, after the League of Nations gave the British a “mandate” to govern what was now referred to as Iraq, Leachman was trying to subdue restive Arab tribesmen. He advocated “wholesale slaughter” as the only really effective method, and in present-day Iraq his assassin, Sheikh Dhari, is remembered as a hero and a patriot. The Sheikh’s descendants gave his gun to Saddam as a birthday present a few years ago.

Back in the diwaniya, over tea, Sheikh Muther became agitated. “Leachman was trying to make war between the people in Iraq in order to get what he wanted,” he yelled. “Tell America not to attack! I am a warrior just like Sheikh Dhari, and I will defend my country bravely.” He chuckled and grinned and grabbed me in an affectionate-seeming embrace. Once our clinch was broken, I asked Muther what lessons the Americans should draw from the British experience, and Abdul Razaq spoke up. “We learned many lessons about how to defend ourselves from any kind of occupation. The Americans and British cannot occupy Iraq. Nobody can occupy Iraq.”

The New Yorker