SADDAM'S EAR.(Iraqi plastic surgeon Ala Bashir and his relationship with Saddam Hussein)

The day after the U.S. Army seized Saddam International Airport and renamed it Baghdad International, a man I knew, Dr. Ala Bashir, received a message from Saddam Hussein. Ala Bashir was a plastic surgeon who had had an unusually friendly relationship with Saddam for twenty years and was also a member of the medical team responsible for his care. He was the director of a small hospital, the Saddam Center for Reconstructive Surgery, on the east side of the Tigris, but one day each week he was on round-the-clock duty at Saddam's personal clinic, which had recently been moved from the Republican Palace complex, on the west side of the river, to a secret location that was unlikely to be targeted by American bombs. He was at the clinic on Friday, April 4th, the day the Americans took control of the airport. He went home early to look after his elderly mother, who was unwell, and the next day, Saturday, one of Saddam's guards came to his house and told him to pack his bags and return "immediately, immediately"to the clinic. The guard left, and Bashir soon followed. He didn't show up for work at the hospital the next day, and no one seemed to know where he was.

I heard about Bashir's disappearance a few days later, while the city was being sacked by looters, marines were searching a mosque where Saddam was said to be hiding, and thieves were absconding with most of the antiquities in the National Museum. I had gone to the hospital to see how Ala Bashir was doing. One of his colleagues, Dr. Walid, who had just finished operating on a wounded man, took me aside and said that he feared the worst.

I had met Ala Bashir in Baghdad in the summer of 2000, when I was given a letter of introduction to him by Naji Sabri Al Hadithi, who was then Saddam's ambassador in Vienna and was until recently--when he and the rest of the government disappeared--the Iraqi Foreign Minister. I visited Bashir in his office, and he talked to me about politics and history. He was an unusual-looking man. Most Baghdadis his age--he was then sixty-one--are rotund and pale-skinned. Bashir was tall and lithe, and his skin was a walnut-brown color. He had a large beaked nose, and his face was clean-shaven, which was also unusual among Iraqi men, who generally have thick mustaches. But the most distinctive thing about his appearance was his hair, which hung in a long white fringe from the sides and the back of his otherwise bald head. Most Iraqi men have neat haircuts or, possibly, if they are young, shaved heads with a little bristle visible--the Uday Hussein look. Bashir dressed in a distinctive way, also, often in a brown corduroy suit, which is a very un-Iraqi thing to wear.

Ala Bashir had a quiet and self-effacing manner, and he talked about how Saddam was doing the best he could for his country, and made some remarks to the effect that Adolf Hitler had got a bad rap from historians. I quoted his comments in an article I wrote about Iraq, and when I returned to Baghdad late last year I went to see Bashir again. He said that I had perhaps "overemphasized"his remarks about Hitler, but he didn't bear a grudge, and we met two or three more times. Just before I was to leave, he asked me to meet him in a neutral place, and suddenly and unexpectedly he began to talk, in a low voice, about how fearful Iraqis were. He never mentioned Saddam's name, but he spoke about political repression, executions and disappearances, and how no one could ever say what was truly on his mind. I knew that he was taking a risk in saying these things, and I steered the conversation back to mundane matters. When I went to see him a few days later, to say goodbye, I intentionally did so formally, in front of several of his colleagues.

In February, a month before the war began, I was back in Baghdad, and Bashir and I met quite often, sometimes in his office. If there were other people there--Bashir had many visitors--our conversations were fairly superficial, like those between polite friends, and dealt with topics of current interest, such as the looming war. I also went to his home for dinner several times, and to the home of a friend of his, Samir Khairi Tawfik, who was then a senior official at the Foreign Ministry. Bashir lived in a Western-style house, built in the nineteen-sixties, in the Al Jihad neighborhood of southwestern Baghdad. Two Mercedes sedans and a Hyundai S.U.V. were parked in the carport. None of them were new, and they seemed never to be driven. (Bashir usually travelled in a chauffeur-driven, government-issue Toyota Land Cruiser.) The curtains of the house were always drawn, and the place seemed rather forlorn. Bashir's wife and his daughter, who is twenty-three, were in Amman, and he had told them to stay there until the war was over. He had four children, the first two of whom, both boys, were born in England, where he had worked as a surgeon in the early nineteen-seventies, after receiving a degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. His two eldest sons lived in England now, and another son studied music in France. There were family pictures on the wall in the living room, among them a recent one of a smiling toddler grandson and, in a discreet corner, a framed portrait of Bashir standing at some public function with Saddam Hussein. It was the only image of Saddam I saw there.

Most of the art in the house was made by Bashir, who was an eminent painter and sculptor as well as a medical doctor. He had received commissions for several large public monuments in Baghdad, including a prominent one at the memorial to the attack in 1991 on the Amiriya air-raid shelter, where an American bomb killed more than four hundred people, most of them women and children. Bashir's art, unlike that of most contemporary Iraqi artists, was rooted in Surrealism, and much of it was symbolically foreboding. The gruesome, Medusa-like bronze of an androgynous human face grimacing in pain at the Amiriya memorial is a terrifying piece. Bashir said that there was nothing else like it in Baghdad because Saddam preferred literal, figurative art. But he let Bashir do pretty much what he wanted. We drove out one day to a traffic circle at the southern edge of Baghdad, where Bashir's most recent large piece stands. It consists of two sensuously joined blocks of cut limestone, about thirty feet high, the shape of one resembling, by design, Bashir said, a woman's back. He said that he had titled it "The Union,"but that it was officially called "The Union Between the Leader and His People."He shrugged. It didn't really matter what it was called. At least he had managed to avoid putting a statue of Saddam in front of it, which several officials had requested, or adding a replica of one of Saddam's fists.

Bashir didn't speak freely to me about Saddam Hussein very often, but once or twice, when we were alone in his house, he described the terrified sycophants who surrounded the President, and his pathological, "worthless"sons, and the curious affection he seemed to feel for Bashir. "Even his brother Barzan”--the former intelligence chief and Saddam's personal banker--"who is a friend of mine, says I am blessed by God to speak to his brother in the way I do. No one else can or does. Even his own family is afraid of him."But Bashir also said that most of the people he knew, including some high-ranking generals and ministers, wanted a change, and would be angry if Bush decided not ...