THE NEXT IRAQI WAR.

Luna Dawood was twenty-four years old when Saddam Hussein paid a surprise visit to her house in Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed city in northern Iraq. She admits that she reacted like a teen-ager. It was an October afternoon in 1983, and two Presidential helicopters landed in an open field; tanks cordoned off the tidy middle-class streets of the Arrapha neighborhood, home to employees of the state-owned Northern Oil Company; and Saddam, flanked by a large security entourage, showed up at the Dawoods' kitchen door. The Baathists' long-standing war against Iraqi Kurds was intensifying, and it appeared that Saddam wanted to secure the loyalty of those who worked in Kirkuk's valuable oil industry. Even today, Dawood, whose father was employed by the oil company, recalls Saddam's visit a bit giddily: he was handsome in his olive-drab military uniform, and paused to admire the house and ask friendly questions. His cologne was so overpowering that, for days afterward, Dawood couldn't wash the scent off the hand that had shaken the President's, and the living-room sofa smelled so strongly that it had to be given away.

Saddam refused coffee and chocolates, but a painting of a woman drawing water from a tree-shaded river caught his eye--Dawood's brother, who was serving on the front in the Iran-Iraq war, had painted it--and the President claimed it as a gift. The Dawoods are Assyrian Christians, not Arabs, and when Saddam addressed Luna's mother in Arabic she replied in English, which she'd learned from the British managers of the Iraqi Petroleum Company before it was nationalized by the Baathists, in 1972. "That time is gone," Saddam scolded her. "You must learn Arabic."

A Presidential trailer was parked in the Dawoods' garden, and neighbors lined up to go inside for a private audience with the President. Saddam's close adviser and half brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, presented each petitioner with three thousand dinars from a bag full of money. To her everlasting regret, Dawood was too timorous to enter Saddam's trailer. Her younger sister Fula did so, and emerged with both the cash and a job at the oil company. One of Dawood's cousins entreated Saddam to release his brother, who was serving five years in prison for comparing the face of a top Baathist official to that of a monkey; Saddam replied that he couldn't interfere with the judicial system. Then he came out of the trailer to tell the assembled residents that Iraq was at war with Iran to protect the purity of Iraqi women from Ayatollah Khomeini's rampaging troops. The helicopters took off, and everyone assumed that Saddam had left Kirkuk.

But the trailer remained in the Dawoods' garden; their phone was cut off, and security men gathered in the kitchen. Without explanation, the family was told to spend the night on the second floor. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, Dawood went to the window and looked down at the garden. As if in a dream, she saw Saddam step out of the trailer wearing a white dishdasha. The next day, he was gone.

The President visited Kirkuk again in 1990. This time, his helicopter landed in the square in front of the municipal building. By then, Dawood was working there, as an accountant in the finance department. Saddam announced a campaign to beautify Kirkuk: the walled citadel--the oldest part of the city, situated on a plateau across the dry Khasa River bed from the modern city--was going to be cleaned up, beginning with the removal of the eight or nine hundred mostly Kurdish and Turkoman families living in its ancient houses. The next day, fifty million dinars arrived at Dawood's office from Baghdad. She had forty-five days to dig through title deeds, some dating back to 1820, and pay compensation to displaced homeowners.

The process of emptying out the Kirkuk citadel was the climax of a forty-year campaign known to Iraqis as Arabization. Beginning in 1963, and continuing up to the eve of the American invasion last year, the Baathist regime in Baghdad deported tens of thousands of Kurds--some Kurdish sources put the number at three hundred thousand--from Kirkuk and the surrounding region, forced other ethnic minorities from their houses, and imported similar numbers of Arabs to Kirkuk from the south. Dawood's job in city government, which she has held since the mid-nineteen-eighties, required her to distribute dinars to families forfeiting their homes, sift through crumbling property records, and handle the traffic of deportees at the municipal building. She was a bureaucratic expediter of ethnic cleansing.

I met Dawood during a trip to Kirkuk this summer. A slim, energetic forty-five-year-old, she is unmarried, and, unlike most Iraqi women, she wears Western clothes and carries herself with self-confidence. She has wide, startled eyes and the kind of strong nose seen on statuary from Nineveh, and when she talks about Kirkuk's history under Saddam her anxious smile reveals a row of crooked teeth. "It was a tragedy I don't want to remember," she told me when we met in her office. She then proceeded to remember everything. "They were poor people," she said. "Each one who came to take the money, in his eyes you saw the tractor coming to take his house." Crowds awaiting deportation filled the hallway outside her office; women fainted. If the secret police instructed her to delay paying someone they intended to arrest, Dawood would quietly urge the reluctant man to leave Kirkuk without his money.