The new tyrant of Iraq
The President woke up in an unfamiliar tent hours later. He had been stretched flat on a cot, a light cotton sheet thrown over him. He lifted his head off the pillow and sat up. A man who might have been an Iraqi pointed a machine gun at him. “Don’t worry, Your Excellency, you are not dead.”
“I feel so relieved,” said the President, staring the length of the barrel of the gun. “And you would be?” The man looked familiar to the President, somehow.
“Not unless you take the long view, and you don’t, my family is of no acquaintance with your family, Your Excellency. Not directly. Indirectly, yes. We’ve had dealings. Rather extensive.” The gunman smiled. “We both love oil.”
“Are you Iraqi? Al-Qaeda? Iranian? The Taliban.”
“That is neither here nor there,” said the man with the gun. “I am your guard, your guide, your provider of all things good.”
The President was suddenly struck by the stillness, the silence outside the opaque walls of the tent. “Am I dead? Is this – “
“That will be for you to determine,” said the guard. He put down his gun on a wooden chair and turned his back and walked to the other end of the tent.
The President attempted to stand and grab the gun but was knocked flat on the cot as if by an invisible hand.
Not a hand he had much use for at the moment. Striking how the “invisible hand” benefits the strong at the expense of the weak.
“Know this, and call me what you like: to you, I am God,” said the man. “We are going places.” He opened a flap in the tent. A bright light spilled in. He turned briefly back to the President of the United States. “We are going places, you and I. We are going to see the world, the two of us. Give it a quick once over. And not necessarily for your edification, for you are unteachable. But we must. God must have his day.” He walked out, closing the flap behind him. All at once, the President of the United States recognized the man as the former Dictator of Iraq, the ghost of the executed dictator, Saddam Hussein. And then the President of the United States woke up.
