The Imperial Imperative

Enter the gold-plated doors of the Republican Palace that Saddam Hussein had built for himself in Baghdad, and the searing heat of midday gives way to the cool, quiet hum of air conditioning.

A few American soldiers with square jaws, wide shoulders, and heavy body armor sit in delicate gilt parlor chairs, shifting uncomfortably on the narrow red-velvet cushions. Their M-16s rest on elegant tea tables.

The sound of desert boots on the polished marble floors gives a muffled echo as groups led by US military officers in neatly pressed fatigues and bureaucrats in starched white short-sleeve shirts march from one meeting to the next.

In small clusters around the doorways of the palace's various drawing rooms and parlors are the American contractors, big men in cowboy boots and baseball caps with rugged Texas-oil faces whose American-based companies are pulling down multibillion-dollar contracts to rebuild Iraq.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, is the United States-led body running the occupation of Iraq, and the toppled dictator's sprawling palace now serves as its headquarters -- the heart of American power in Baghdad.

There are other countries' soldiers attached to the coalition. They are British, Spanish, and Italian forces whose dress uniforms carry the insignia, plumes, and sashes of royal regiments with centuries-old histories from empires past. These uniforms and the trim European men who wear them seem somehow more at home in the palace setting than their American counterparts.

I was invited to the palace in mid-November for a lunch with a senior official in the CPA to discuss the new American empire and how it was doing in the ancient lands of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, which so many empires before it -- from ancient Rome to Great Britain -- had never been able to control. At least not for long.

These were Hussein's final weeks as a fugitive, and the American-led forces were, they boasted, in the final stages of dismantling the regime -- a pivotal point in the occupation of Iraq.

As we walk the hallways, my host points out the Jerusalem Room, which US forces had converted into an "ecumenical place of prayer."

There is an empty throne from which Hussein once presided, an ethereal ceiling painting of the Muslim holy site of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and wall murals of Scud missiles piercing through billowy clouds. On the floor is a stack of prayer mats for Muslims, and in one corner a few American soldiers huddle together in folding chairs leafing through well-worn volumes of the New Testament in an impromptu prayer group.

"Kind of neat seeing Christian prayer in there, isn't it?" the CPA official asks.

We move on to a massive ballroom that has been transformed into a mess hall. The food-service contract is provided by the American contractor Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil company where Vice President Dick Cheney once served as chief executive officer.

The company chose a red-white-and-blue theme for the plastic trays, paper plates, and serving stations. The day's menu is chicken a la king and cheeseburgers. A 20-foot salad bar with troughs of fresh produce flown in from Kuwait carries virtually every flavor of Kraft dressing you could find in the biggest supermarket in the big state of Texas.

"Is America an empire? Yes," says the CPA official as we sit down with our mounds of chicken a la king on white bread, washed down with cans of Coke.

My host is tall, with eyes the color of a big Nebraska sky and a demeanor that says country, not city. He isn't slick. He has that classically American resonance in his voice, a well-honed sense of sincerity.

"Of course, we are an empire, but we are different," he says. "Our empire is not defined by territorial ambitions but by ideas. A lot of ideas, like free trade, like democracy, like copyright laws."

Copyright? Was my host really suggesting that we had carried out one of the largest land invasions since World War II to protect copyright laws?

"Well, yeah, our empire is about promoting free trade, it's about promoting democracy and the ownership of ideas. Sure, it's about McDonald's and Microsoft and everything else. But the reality is we are not here only to do that. We are here to protect the security of America. That's what the mission is about.

"That, and to help the Iraqi people build their own future," he adds.

But one thing the American empire apparently did not bring into this palace is freedom of speech, at least not on-the-record freedom of speech. My host informs me that it would be impossible for him to give an on-the-record interview and still talk candidly. So he requests that his name not be published. I agree.

The closest thing the America empire has to a Roman proconsul in Iraq is Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III. He is America's top official in Baghdad and is obsessed with controlling the message of the occupation. That message in the first half of November was the good news of the US-led effort, and he was chiding his staffers for failing to get that message out to the media while also insisting that they not speak on the record.

My host was not obsessive but persistent and kept doing everything he could to steer our conversation away from the talk of empire. If America is an empire, I suggest, it is one in denial, and he nods and smiles slightly.

THE UNITED STATES HAS 750 MILITARY bases dotted across three-quarters of the countries of the world. Its Special Operations Command -- a unified forward command of 25,000 troops, including Rangers, Delta, psychological operations, Airborne, and Special Forces -- is currently deployed in at least 65 countries. Its hegemony in the post-Cold War era goes virtually unchallenged.

America holds 31 percent of the world's wealth. Its symbols of commercial imperialism, from Starbucks to McDonald's and Hollywood to Microsoft Windows, are pervasive in every corner of the global village. It has assumed the international burden of not just fighting terrorism and rogue states but also proselytizing for the benefits of democracy and its attendant, capitalism.

The US military has invaded two countries in the last two years, and Washington's use of unilateral diplomacy, its open contempt for international organizations and rejection of international treaties, and its self-proclaimed doctrine of preemptive war have stirred the ire of the empires of old in Europe. Such actions have these countries increasingly using the "E" word, so much so that it has become cliche. The chattering class in Europe has even been casting about the diplomatic lingua franca for the appropriate word to describe an American hegemony that is extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled in history.

"Superpower" seemed an understatement in the post-Cold War era. "Hyper-power" (hyper-puissance) is the word the French prefer, but it hasn't caught on. "Colossus" is the way Great Britain's The Economist has described it. But increasingly the reference in Paris and Berlin and London is simply the "new American empire."

It is a turn of phrase that suggests America has long been in the business of imperial aspirations but that now it has somehow reconsidered an understanding of its place in the world or, perhaps more precisely, rebranded its position atop it.

Joseph Nye, assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton and now dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, describes the sweep of American power succinctly in the first sentence of his book The Paradox of American Power: "Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others."

Still, culturally it seems Americans reject an image of themselves as an empire. They cling to the nation's birth narrative -- that it was founded in a revolution against an empire. That founding spirit is still how America chooses to see itself. To call itself an empire would contravene its own myth of creation.

In his first visit to Iraq as secretary of state, Colin Powell said, "We are not an empire. . . . We come here as liberators."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera in the aftermath of the war, "We don't do empire."

So denial holds strong -- even as some of Europe's best historians make a convincing argument that there is danger in America's denial of the role that has been thrust upon it, or that it thrusts upon the world.

The historian Niall Ferguson, author of the best-selling book and British TV series Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, said in an interview: "The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. And an empire that doesn't recognize its own power -- and the limits of that power -- is a dangerous one."

Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations, concluded in his recent book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy: "The conceit that America is by its very nature innocent of imperial pretensions has become not only untenable but also counterproductive: It impedes efforts to gauge realistically the challenges facing the United States as a liberal democracy intent on presiding over a global order in which American values and American power enjoy pride of place."

One of the more obvious dangers, these historians say, is stumbling into the mistakes of past empires such as the Roman, the Ottoman, and the British. Each of those in its own time and its own way became mired in the Mesopotamian plain, which lies in modern-day Iraq.

Another pitfall is one that all previous empires faced as well -- the balance between the raw exertion of military power and the more subtle use of incentives to create stable societies for our economic and strategic interests and, when possible, to have those societies conform to the American ideals of the free market and open democracy.

America is struggling with what is referred to in Washington circles as hard power, or military might, versus soft power, the power of persuasion in which American economic success and political vitality speak for themselves. Nye coined the twin phrases, and they've caught on. And trying to strike that balance is a struggle as ancient as Rome itself.

Nye predicts that the American empire will maintain its sway well into this century but cautions: "America must not only maintain its hard power but understand its soft power and how to combine the two in the pursuit of national and global interests."

If the United States fails to find that balance, the American experience in Iraq may prove to be a lesson on the limits of national power.

My unnamed host turns the conversation to the Coalition Provisional Authority and its success. He wants to pick a reporter's brain about why the media are not writing the good stories about this occupation. In other words, he is doing his job. He wants to know why the construction of schools, the rebuilding of hospitals, the opening of electricity plants and water treatment facilities are lost every day in the pace of hard news about the mounting number of attacks on US soldiers.

As we speak, my Thuraya satellite telephone signals a text message for a breaking news story. A Chinook helicopter is down. The first count of casualties is several American soldiers killed. We keep talking. Then a second text message confirms at least 10 killed, many wounded.

We keep talking. Then a third text message reads, 15 soldiers killed and 50 wounded.

I tell the official I have to go. Immediately.

On this day, at least, hard power is revealing its extraordinary cost, and soft power still seems a hypothetical to be discussed in the air-conditioned palace.

ack out in the heat of Baghdad, my driver, Samir Al Jabouri, is waiting, the massive V-8 engine of his Chevrolet Caprice Classic idling on the perimeter of the palace, with its cordons of barbed wire and checkpoints manned by US tanks. Al Jabouri's Chevy barrels through Baghdad and out onto the highway that heads west to Fallujah. Early reports indicate that the Chinook has gone down there, in the heartland of the so-called Sunni Triangle.

The triangle is an arc of towns and villages north and west of Baghdad that was home to the Sunni Muslim minority in Iraq from which Hussein drew his most loyal supporters. It is also where the most intense fighting against US troops by the Iraqi insurgency has been taking place.

Over the Euphrates River and into a soft river plain with a grove of date-palm trees, we arrive within sight of the downed chopper. The locals tell us that insurgents used the palm grove as cover to fire what US military officials later confirm was a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile. The insurgents knocked the hulking Vietnam-era helicopter out of the sky and sent it spiraling to earth, where it landed in a heap of wreckage now splayed in the open field. It is getting near sunset, and a crowd of villagers taunts the US soldiers still sifting through the strewn debris.

The crowd chants: "Saddam. Saddam. With our blood and with our soul, we will redeem you."

Young boys forage in a cornfield for pieces of the wreckage, and one of them returns with a big green piece of twisted metal and hands it to me, saying, "This is a present for your American army from the people of Fallujah."

Searching the crowd for adults, I see a gentleman on an old motorcycle with a side seat. His 12-year-old son is accompanying him as he rushes home with food to end the Ramadan fast. He is not there as part of the demonstration but stopped to find out what was going on. He is a grocery-store owner.

"Do you support what this crowd is saying?" I ask through Al Jabouri. "Do you really support killing the American troops and wanting Saddam to return?"

"No, I would not say we want Saddam back. But, yes, America should leave our country. We have the right to fight them.

"The history of Iraq is about fighting empires, and we will fight your empire until it leaves," says the grocery clerk. He waves goodbye as his motorbike heads down a dirt road, kicking up dust and disappearing into the date-palm grove.

n Iraq, the ancient footprints of other empires are everywhere.

And in a hardscrabble landscape of desert wilderness near the northern city of Mosul lie the ruins of the ancient temples of Hatra. In the third century, Hatra marked the "furthest point to the southeast occupied by Roman troops," says Fergus Millar, an Oxford University history professor and expert on the Roman Near East. I met with him in England before my trip to Baghdad, at the cafe of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, which houses many Roman antiquities plundered by British explorers from the far-flung outposts of Rome that the British empire had come to occupy.

It was Millar who told me that Hatra was an important stop in understanding the Roman presence in the ancient Near East. The city was besieged by the Roman emperor Trajan in the early part of the second century. That was during the Parthian War, a running conflict that, according to Millar, demonstrated the continued vitality of Roman imperialism and the first sign of a strategic commitment to controlling the region that would last until the eighth-century Islamic conquest.

We set out to visit the city from Mosul and travel south through the vast desert wilderness. Oil pipelines snake along the dusty stretch of road that ends at Hatra.

Ismael Rasheed, 40, who worked for 14 years as a chief archeologist at this site and was the resident expert on Hatra for the Mosul Museum, accompanies us.

Rasheed says the Romans who came to fortify Hatra arrived with their own architects and engineers. Rasheed quips: "They were like your KBR," the Halliburton subsidiary.

And indeed, in one corner of the ancient city, American contractors have left an architectural mark -- albeit a flimsy one. Several white prefab huts have been constructed for guards and attendants to watch over the ruins and protect them from widespread looting that has been taking place at ancient sites across Iraq. The construction is also part of a nascent effort by the US military to help local Iraqi businessmen cash in on Hatra as a tourism attraction. Although Hatra is a United Nations-recognized World Heritage property, a group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division has been working on a tourism scheme with locals to draw attention to Hatra as the place where the opening scene of The Exorcist was filmed.

When we finally arrive at the site of the temples and begin to wander inside its labyrinth, my translator exclaims, "Look! It's the White House."

The dark-brown limestone facade of the entrance to a Roman temple does, in fact, have the same pattern of classical columns and lintels that inspired the Palladian architecture of that American temple on Pennsylvania Avenue, which my translator had come to know from Al-Jazeera or CNN.

Washington built its halls of power to pay homage to the ancient ideals of Greece and Rome, but the Romans built their temples at Hatra to pay homage to the Sun God. Hatra's frescoes told the story of past battles. One dated AD 197 depicted the Roman legions under Emperor Septimius Severus, with horses and carriages, the ancient equivalent of American Humvees, charging into battle.

A Roman army was garrisoned at Hatra until at least the third century but found resistance among the indigenous community and their feudal kings, whom the Romans could not always succeed in buying off. The Romans eventually cut their losses and left. The Persians held the kingdom on and off through the following centuries. But during its campaigns, Rome would recapture this unruly little kingdom, and ultimately Hatra represented the farthest limits of imperial overstretch.

Aware of Hatra's symbolic place in Iraq's history of fighting empires, Hussein wanted to put his stamp on the ancient city. In April 1990, just before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that summer, Hussein came to Hatra to order that his initials be carved in ornate calligraphy on each of the 25,000 face stones of the temples.

"Iraq has always resisted foreign invaders as much as it could. It would accept them for a while, as long as they fulfilled their purpose, and then force them out," says Rasheed. "That is the story of Hatra as best we know it, and there are pieces of that story still missing."

The American military presence in the area of Hatra is led by Major General David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, headquartered in Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq. With his Princeton doctorate and a teaching stint at West Point, Petraeus is among the military's best and brightest.

The 20,000 soldiers in Iraq under his command helped carry out what is considered one of the largest airborne assaults in history when they swept into Iraq in April as the regime's resistance crumbled.

Now the 101st is the military occupier of four governorates of northern Iraq, an area covering roughly 75,000 square miles in which about 8 million Iraqis live. Since last summer, the division has concentrated on finding that balance between soft power and hard power. And Petraeus is widely credited as the military commander who has so far come closest to achieving it.

His 101st carried out relentless searches of Baath figures' homes and in the process discovered and killed Hussein's two sons in a wild shootout. The soldiers uprooted what they described as terrorist training camps and destroyed massive weapons depots. But they also poured resources and sweat into building schools and digging wells. The all-American entrepreneurial spirit that Petraeus sought to foster was captured in the name given to a unit that sought to recruit Iraqis to paint over the old murals of Saddam Hussein: Task Force Tom Sawyer.

Petraeus says he believes that none of what he and his men are doing in Iraq has anything to do with building an American empire. In this sense, he both reflects an image Americans like to see of their country and arguably embodies what BU's Bacevich calls the conceit of an empire in denial.

"I don't think we are an empire. We don't have imperial designs. I think we'd be happy to live and let live. We'd like to see certain democratic and economic ideals flourish, but not to the point of forcing it on people," Petraeus tells me in a long interview at his headquarters in Mosul. His office is in one of the grand rooms of one of Hussein's many former palaces.

"We want to be seen as an army of liberation and not an army of occupation," he says. "But there is a half-life on our role here; you wear out your welcome at some point. It doesn't matter how helpful you are.

"We aren't here to stay."

With these words, he echoes the sentiments of past empires and their generals.

n November 1914, the Ottoman Empire's sultan, the self-proclaimed spiritual head of Sunni Muslims, responded to German prompting by declaring a jihad on the British and their allies.

That opened the theater of war in the Middle East, with its strategic geopolitical significance and its vast reserves of oil -- which Britain needed for industry and for the Royal Navy that ensured its military might.

In the initial stages, the British moved with ease into Mesopotamia, as Iraq was then called, taking the port of Basra and beginning an advance up the Tigris. But the British hit a wall in Kut el Amara. It was there that thousands of soldiers -- two-thirds of them Indian -- were besieged for five months. The British general Charles Townshend was forced to surrender his men in one of the most disastrous chapters of the empire's military history.

A British war cemetery on the outskirts of Basra is still there on a dusty plain just off a highway. It had fallen into disrepair through decades of neglect, but the British forces within the US-led coalition in Iraq that now control the south have repaired the monument and fixed the broken headstones. Many of the soldiers in today's British Army have an impressive understanding of their own regimental histories. A 20-year-old soldier from Cardiff is able to point to the headstones of the Royal Regiment of Wales and tell how the forces fell and how several of his relatives served, and died, there.

Another soldier, Second Lieutenant John Kestin, 23, wears on his beret the regiment's trademark insignia of feathers, symbolizing the prince of Wales, while he patrols the streets of Basra one afternoon in November. We bounce along in the back of an armored British Land Rover that came straight from the streets of Belfast. Kestin says: "A lot of the experience the lads have now has been learned in Northern Ireland, in Sierra Leone, and in the Balkans. It's the experience of empire in modern times, taking the lessons of the past and bringing them into the present."

There are memories of the siege at Kut that linger even today on the other side as well.

In Kut's marketplace, locals gather and say that to understand Iraq's perspective on the history of the British occupation and the siege in Kut, the person to talk to is the mukhtar, Arabic for a town leader or elder. In a run-down neighborhood built under Hussein's reign, a man named Omar Darwish, but whom everyone calls Mukhtar Omar, emerges from the shade of the vines that cover a dirt courtyard in front of his home. He is 75 years old and tells of his years as a young man working for a British construction company building the railway to Baghdad. He says that his father fought in the legendary siege of Kut and recounted the stories to him.

"We are a free people," says Darwish. "We don't accept anyone to come and control us. The US should leave by themselves. They came to occupy us, and we have never accepted that. They want to be an empire, but we don't see it that way. They are a new country with little culture and a big military. To use your might to fight small countries is not being an empire, it is just being a bully," he says, as young men -- several of them his own grandchildren -- listen to his stories in the fading light before sunset.

After the disaster in Kut, the British reconstituted their military strategy in the Middle East. The idea was to foster nationalism among the Bedouin tribes living in the area that today includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and historical Palestine. After building up the Bedouins' sense of national identity, the British would then encourage them to revolt against the German-backed Ottoman Empire. It was an Oxford historian turned British special agent who nurtured the plan and became synonymous with it: T. E. Lawrence.

The Hollywood classic Lawrence of Arabia has lines and images still relevant today. One TV news clip in late October -- of Iraqi attacks on US forces -- seemed straight out of the film: The insurgents had bombed a US supply train in the desert, just as the Arabs under Lawrence had done to the Turkish supply trains. Beyond the imagery, Lawrence's words, close to the end of the seven-year campaign for Bedouin autonomy in Mesopotamia, which continued after the war, seem hauntingly on point for the aftermath of the US-led war in Iraq.

In correspondence to The Times of London, dated August 22, 1920, Lawrence wrote: "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. Things are far worse than we have been told."

he University of Al Mustansiriya in Baghdad is the country's premier institution of higher education, with a tradition that dates to the Golden Age of Islam in the 13th century. Now it lies largely in ruins. Not from American bombs but from looting by angry Iraqis.

The rage of students and the general population exploded here as it did everywhere, leaving smashed windows and hollowed buildings blackened by fire. In one lecture hall that survived the looting, a history class is gathering on an afternoon in late November.

The professor, Ala Jassim Al-Harbi, 49, has taught contemporary history of Iraq at the school since 1986 and, like most of the former faculty, was a connected member of Hussein's Baath party. He was somehow spared in a postwar purge of the Baathist teaching staff. The students quiet as he enters the room.

"We are going to begin with the 1920 revolution against British occupation," says Al-Harbi. "During the last lesson we talked about Iraq's natural resources, oil, and its strategic position, and that this was why the British invaded Iraq. General Maude, when he entered Baghdad, told the people that he came as a liberator and not as an invader. We talked about how all that was a lie," he says, lecturing the students with rehearsed dramatic pauses between sentences.

He searches the class for nods of recognition. I don't see any. I see students shifting uncomfortably, and I hear one of them whispering to my translator in Arabic: "He is a Baathist. He is a bastard from the old regime."

The lecture continues.

"The British governor ordered that when British soldiers walked by, the Iraqi people should stand up out of respect. They treated them roughly if they did not. Maybe now you are seeing how Americans treat Iraqis. The house searches. The children crying. The use of dogs. We know that dogs are unclean and unholy animals. The British thought the opposite. They loved their breeding dogs.

"And we know, too, that the Americans love their dogs. Under the sanctions, the average cost of food each day was less than what the average American dog receives from its owner," he continued.

Then it happens.

One of the students, a large boy in a black shirt, puts his hand in the air and speaks: "It was under Saddam's regime that we were treated like dogs and forced to eat like dogs. That was Saddam's regime."

The words hang in the air like illumination rounds that American infantry divisions fire at night over the battlefield. The classroom erupts in shouting. The professor demands order.

"Why don't you let us talk?" one student shouts.

"Don't hide the truth," says another.

There is an Arab revolt going on in the Baathist lecture hall, and it is the single most revealing discourse on liberation that I have witnessed in my three months spent covering the war and its aftermath. Turning red-faced, the professor struggles to regain control of the class.

He begins to speak of how the Shiite population in the south was among the first to rise up against both the Ottomans and the British. He mentions that the Ottomans in particular had been harsh with the Shiites.

"Just like Saddam," says a student named Ali, rail thin but with steady dark-brown eyes.

Another explosion of defiance erupts in the classroom. The professor again struggles to bring quiet.

"There were people who collaborated with the British, who sold the Iraqi national interest," the professor says. "You have to be very careful when history is being made. The side you chose will be remembered."

Adnan, a student in a blue-check flannel shirt, stands up and says, "You talk about people who sold this country, who let the British steal its resources. Don't you think Saddam stole from our country and from all of us?"

The classroom breaks out in argument, with the students yelling at the professor. Now any semblance of order has collapsed. They accuse him of being a member of the Baathist regime. They accuse him of serving in the Mukhabarat, Hussein's feared security services.

It is an extraordinary moment in the new Iraq. I am left wondering if it has not unfolded in part for the benefit of an American reporter. But there is an overriding truth of this moment -- that the students wanted to see Hussein's regime gone and their loathing for it was now embodied in their professor. Their open contempt for him is a bold statement with uncertain consequences. Hussein had not yet been captured, and many in Iraq in November still feared that somehow the Baathists could reemerge.

After the class, I stay behind and speak with the students. There in the quiet back rows of the auditorium they are willing to address the question of the day: Is America another conquering empire? And their conclusion is an unequivocal yes. They agree with the essence of the professor's lecture that America is an empire not unlike Britain's. The United States came to Iraq for its oil, for its strategic position in the geo-political minefield of the Middle East. But they are damned if a Baathist is going to lecture to them. All of them agree America will need to go but not before the Baathist remnant is drummed out of power. They never want to go back to that.

I think this classroom is a microcosm of a country still expressing its rage against the regime that crippled and brutalized its own people. But the students were hastening to add that this did not mean they were willing to welcome American occupation.

Several weeks after I left Iraq, Saddam Hussein was captured near Tikrit. Now the images are iconic: a filthy and humiliated Hussein with a long beard paraded before the television networks like the prisoners of ancient Rome presented in the Colosseum. But with Hussein captured, the essence of American power and the need for the United States to clearly define its mission in Iraq are only sharpened. With Hussein in hand, the United States has fulfilled the core promise of its invasion, and now many Iraqis feel it is time for US forces to leave and allow Iraqis to move more quickly to take control of their own country.

A dialogue between two of the students after class that afternoon in November stands as the challenge to the American empire in Iraq today.

Muhammed Fallah, 22, says: "America needs to stay until Saddam is captured or until they kill him. But it should not stay forever."

Munem Fendi, 19, is quick to agree, adding: "Not one day more. When the British came, they did so under the banner of liberators, just like the American forces. And the British made their promises, just like the Americans. But if the Americans do not keep their promises and leave, then they, too, will have graveyards here full of their soldiers."

Charles M. Sennott, the Globe's London bureau chief, covered the Iraq war and its aftermath.