Tamara Chalabi Writes of Another Iraq Before the War

WASHINGTON -- To most Americans, "Iraq" is a war.

But for Tamara Chalabi, it is more than "a desert of tanks, screaming women and barefoot children." It is the homeland she never knew, "a modern state, an ancient land, a nation, a word, a song, a river, a grave, a shrine, a statue of a deer."

As the last U.S. troops prepare to leave Iraq at the end of the year, Chalabi seeks to reclaim a country "hijacked" by the 2003 invasion in a new book, "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family." The memoir is "my way of connecting with the country and also my attempt to show Iraq in a very different light [than] the prism of war," she says in an interview with AOL News.

If her last name sounds familiar, it is because her father is Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi opposition leader whose lobbying and false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction provided the rationale for America to go to war against Saddam Hussein. Her father is a bogeyman dispensed with on the very first page:

"Everybody asks me about my father. He has been labeled a maverick, a charlatan, a genius. He has been named as the source of supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war in Iraq. He has been called a triple agent for the US, Iran and Israel. But this is my story."

Actually, the book is the story of four generations of Chalabis -- Ahmad doesn't enter the picture until page 220. The wealthy and politically influential Iraqi family was deeply entwined in the history of modern Iraq, from the waning days of the Ottoman Empire to the upheavals of the 20th century that eventually sent the family into exile.

When the newly installed King Faisal arrives in Basra in 1921, Tamara Chalabi's great-grandfather Abdul Hussein is there to greet him. When Prime Minister Nuri Said tries to flee a military coup in 1958, he hides in her aunt Thamina's house before he is shot by soldiers.

Several uncles were jailed for their political beliefs and one taught a future dictator in his law class. "Saddam [Hussein] was academically unexceptional, but he had already established a reputation on campus as a thug," Chalabi writes. When her uncle Hassan, who lost his sight as a child, handed him a failing grade, Saddam growled from the back of the room, "Only a blind man would wear a ridiculous tie like that -- or a member of the bourgeoisie."

Yet as secular Shiites in a country run by the Sunni minority, the Chalabis were "insiders and outsiders at the same time," the author says. When Abdul Hussein Chalabi was named minister of education in 1922, a Shiite cleric issued a fatwa banishing him from a shrine where he had prayed.

'A Contradictory Character'

For all the prominence of the men in her family, Chalabi mostly tells the story through its women. The 36-year-old Harvard-trained historian, born to a Lebanese mother in Beirut, makes clear she is no political analyst. Culture and social norms concern her more -- a glossary of Iraqi terms includes food, clothing and modes of transport such as the guffa, a circular boat common on the Tigris River.

At the heart of the memoir is Bibi, her diminutive but larger-than-life grandmother. A "somewhat contradictory character," the colorful matriarch defied the Western stereotype about Muslim women being silent and subjugated. "She didn't fit into that box," Chalabi says.

Born into a deeply religious and conservative family in 1900, Bibi Bassam lived "by the rules," her granddaughter says. She wed Hadi Chalabi in an arranged marriage and as a young wife prayed at Shiite shrines for a child. Her prayers were answered nine times -- her youngest, Ahmad, was born 26 years after his oldest brother, Rushdi.

But Bibi also embraced modernity. She threw off her abaya in the 1930s, the better to show off her fashionable clothes and expensive jewelry. She played cards and talked politics with her father-in-law, Abdul Hussein. And when he ordered up a feast for the visiting king, he knew better than to ask Bibi, who was clueless in the kitchen. It was left to her mother Rumia to make her famous fesanjoon, a succulent stew of chicken, walnuts and pomegranates.

Yet, as she lay dying in London in 1989, Bibi's last words were a plea to be buried in the vast Shiite burial grounds in the holy city of Najaf. Her wish could not be fulfilled until five years later when it was finally safe for the family to carry her bones there from a temporary grave in Syria.

Through such rich detail, Chalabi portrays an urbane, multicultural Baghdad that "was going somewhere" but now is gone. Once the most advanced country in the Arab world, Iraq was "hurled back to the Middle Ages through misrule, neglect and sanctions," she writes.

Now, with a U.S.-backed constitution that defers to religious law on family matters and the recent return of the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr, she is concerned about more setbacks. Chalabi decries a false "impression" among U.S. policymakers that "if you're more religious and more native-looking, then you are more representative."

One Man Cannot Take a Country to War

The conversation turns, as it inevitably must, to her father -- now an al-Sadr ally spurned by his former American sponsors after accusations of deception and spying for Iran. Chalabi comes unhesitatingly to his defense.

"I fully understand that people need to assign blame" for the war, she says. But given the scope of U.S. power, the reach of its intelligence apparatus and the intricate ways in which foreign policy is conducted, "the accusation that one man could have taken a country to war is really naive."

It is "very easy to vilify someone like my father," she goes on. "He's an outsider, he's a foreigner, he's not part of the U.S. government, and he's a very easy target. But a lot of these accusations have spun out of control, they have become urban myths."

That said, the daughter of one of Iraq's most famous politicians states flatly: "Politics is really overrated."

She splits her time between a home in London and her family's heavily guarded compound in Baghdad, but Chalabi prefers to work on building Iraq's civil society. Her varied interests include a charity that provides affordable prosthetic limbs for Iraqis who lost limbs in attacks and another that promotes organic farming.

Chalabi hopes her humanitarian projects will help heal the country her father left in exile as a boy of 14 and with whom she entered Baghdad for the first time on April 19, 2003, soon after the city fell to U.S. troops.

When the last of those troops depart, it will be "up to the Iraqi people to take on the task of their country. It's their country, it's their responsibility," she says. "I think they should rise up to the challenge."

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