Mustafa, Samir, and Amal had left Baghdad in the early morning, catching a commuter flight to Riyadh, where a military jeep had been waiting to transfer them to Al Kharj Air Force Base. At Al Kharj they had boarded this massive cargolifter. Although the occupation of America was supposed to be winding down, you’d never guess it by the amount of matériel crammed into the plane’s cargo bay. An airman led them forward between the pallets of ammunition, medical supplies, and food rations, and up a stairwell to the passenger deck. There was relatively little human cargo; the handful of occupied seats were taken mostly by flight attendants and other crewmembers not directly involved in flying the plane.
The cargolifter’s scheduled travel time was fifteen hours. Mustafa had brought plenty to read: lots of background material on America, and some classified documents obtained for him, with minimal redactions, by the president’s staff. Samir and Amal had similar reading packets.
“Ready for takeoff,” the pilot announced.
A peculiarity of the cargolifter was that the passenger seats, unlike those in a civilian airliner, were fixed facing backwards, so as the plane lifted off Mustafa was easily able to look out and watch first the eucalyptus tract and then the dusty green patchwork that was Tripoli recede into the distance. Soon they were gone from view and the plane proceeded westward over a tan landscape, the rocks and sand of the great forest yet to be.
Mustafa returned to his reading.
The report, authored by the Political Science Faculty of the University of Sudan at Khartoum, was titled “Colorblind: The Role of Race in the American Insurgency.” It began with a brief recap of the history of black-white relations in 20th-century America. For the first two-thirds of the century, the CSA had practiced a form of racial apartheid—openly in the southern states, and more covertly in the north, where, according to the report, “white citizens wanted the benefits of racial preference without the culpability.”
A Civil Rights Act banning race discrimination had been drafted by the Kennedys and signed into law by LBJ during the first year of his rule. “Statements made by Johnson and his closest aides suggest that in this, as in the attempted conquest of Texas, he believed he was carrying out God’s will. His enemies accused him of more cynical motives. In the south, particularly, the Civil Rights Act was seen as a pretext for expanding federal power and curtailing ‘states’ rights.’ ” Several attempts at insurrection had to be crushed by federal troops. The Department of Justice rounded up political troublemakers—black as well as white—and shipped them off to the front lines of the Heartland War. “While Johnson succeeded at dismantling the American apartheid system—the one truly admirable achievement of his reign—he did not eliminate American racism. Rather, he drove his subjects’ ethnic hatred underground, where it festered for decades, waiting for a chance to spring forth again. That chance finally came in 2003. The Coalition invasion of America crippled federal control over the states. It also created a situation in which open expression of prejudice against darker-skinned people was considered not just politically acceptable, but patriotic . . .”
Enter Boulos al Darir, a favored son of the National Party of God and the man chosen to oversee the reconstruction of America during the crucial first year following the invasion. He was a disaster, issuing a series of unpopular decrees that killed whatever small chance there might have been of a peaceful transition to democracy.
The most infamous of these decrees was Order Number 2, which disbanded the Minutemen—the American National Guard—thereby throwing half a million heavily armed Christians out of work. Order Number 3, a purge of all Christian Democrat Party members from the Federal Civil Service, created another hundred thousand unemployed. “Because many of these civil servants, as well as many of the Minutemen stationed in the Washington, D.C., area, were African-American,” the report stated, “these Orders were widely interpreted as an attempt by the occupying forces to ally with the white majority against the black minority. Had this in fact been the case, Administrator Al Darir’s policy decisions might have been defensible on practical if not moral grounds. However, it appears in hindsight that he acted in ignorance, creating enormous racial animus to no purpose.”
Any favor that Al Darir had incidentally earned with white Americans went out the window with Order Number 5, the decree banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The idea that prohibition could be made to work in what was still a war zone was farcical at best; outside the occupied capital, the ban had little effect on Americans’ drinking habits. But there were other consequences. In suddenly dry Washington, a thriving black market sprang up, giving out-of-work Minutemen a new way to make a living—and a new reason to fight for territory. The Coalition forces, meanwhile, became an army of untrained Halal agents. Troops that should have been helping to reestablish stability were instead sent on search-and-destroy missions for breweries and distilleries. Sometimes they found them. Sometimes they made mistakes and destroyed other targets instead: medical supply factories; food warehouses; schools. News of the worst outrages spread throughout the country, causing more unrest.
At an emergency meeting, some of Al Darir’s aides tried to convince him to repeal the Order. He refused. Then, making the single most regrettable statement of his career, he suggested that if Americans wanted to relax at the end of the day, they should try smoking hashish; the climate of the southern states in particular, Al Darir noted, ought to be excellent for the cultivation of cannabis.
Perhaps he was trying to make a joke. Perhaps he was being overly candid about his own habits. No one ever really knew for sure, and once the remark was leaked to the public by Al Darir’s enemies, he refused all further comment. Morally, of course, the suggestion made no sense: The Quran condemns all intoxicants, not just alcohol. But a much bigger problem was that it displayed, yet again, the administrator’s complete ignorance of American racial sensitivities.
Like cocaine and opium, cannabis had long been illegal in the CSA—not for religious reasons, but out of a belief that its consumption inflamed the lust of black men. In many white communities, Al Darir’s “let them smoke hash” comment was interpreted as an incitement to mass rape. This did not go over well.
It was only a week later that a white mob in Langley hanged the bodies of four Arab civilian contractors from a highway overpass. For Boulos al Darir’s superiors, it was the last straw; as the Marines went into Fairfax County, the administrator was recalled to Riyadh, and his pending Order Number 9, which would have outlawed pork products, was quietly shelved. But the damage had been done, and on one issue at least, white Americans and black Americans were now in total agreement: The Coalition Authority had outstayed its welcome.
Mustafa got up to stretch his legs. He noticed Amal laughing at something from her own reading packet and asked, “What is it?”
“Our tax dollars at work,” Amal said. She showed him a pamphlet, Thirteen Simple Rules for Dealing with Americans, designed for first-time visitors with short attention spans.
Rule #1 was DON’T EXPECT THANKS: “Americans are a proud people. Though their civilization is still in its infancy, they consider themselves equal, if not superior to, older and more established cultures. The fact that they had to be liberated by outsiders is a source of great shame to them, and while the vast majority are grateful for the gift of freedom, they are extremely reluctant to show it.
“You may feel that Americans complain too much. Try to ignore this. Pointing out the many ways in which their lives have improved will only make them complain more. Never tell an American that they ‘ought to be thankful.’ In American culture this is considered a grave insult and may lead to violence.”