BIDEN: Looking at your kids, most you have kids here, and it was the first time in my career, my life, I realized someone could go out and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here — but it’s more important, you’re more important.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart, they never get there again, that there was never going to get — there never going to be that way ever again. That’s how an awful lot you have feel.

There will come a day, I promise you, and you parents as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. [...]

So, hang onto each other. Hang onto each other. And I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you how deeply the five of us on this stage feel about the sacrifices you’ve made for this country. That doesn’t — that doesn’t fill the black hole. You should know only 1 percent of you have fought these wars and much less thank God than 1 percent of those that fought the wars are going through what you’re going through.

We owe you more than we can ever, ever repay you. As I said, my prayer is that that smile will come sooner than later, but I promise you it will come. God bless you all and my God protect our troops. Thank you.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired a clip of Biden’s speech:

Watch video of the MRAP touching down on American soil:

Another video shows what appears to be an American-made SUV running over a civilian without stopping. The car videoing the incident also does not stop:

Harpers reports that “the tape ended with the inscription ‘In support of security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Fatima al-Himidi (in brown headscarf), 17, embraces an unknown person

A 32-year-old Iraqi victim of a brutal beating in her San Diego, California, home died yesterday when, with doctors’ expectations that she would not survive, her family removed her from life support. Shaima Alawadi’s family thinks the beating constitutes a hate crime, and police acknowledge the possibility.

Alawadi, a mother of five children aged 8 to 17, immigrated to the U.S. from Iraq in 1993. On Wednesday, her eldest daughter, Fatima al-Himidi, found Aalwadi “drowning in her own blood.” Al-Himidi said her mother was beaten with a tire iron. The daughter told San Diego’s KUSI television news that a note near her mother read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” (Another report said the note read, “Go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.”)

“We’re not the terrorists,” al-Himidi said, speaking to the news camera, her voice shaky with emotion. “You are, whoever did it.”

Watch the KUSI news report:

Fatima al Hamidi also told KUSI that the family had gotten another similar, threatening note earlier this month, but that her mother dismissed it as a prank by neighborhood kids. No report was filed with the police.

A family friend, Sura Alzaidy, said the al-Himidi and Alawadi family had only returned to San Diego — into their new home — three weeks ago after an unspecified period of time living in Michigan. Speaking with the San Diego Union-Tribune, she described Alawadi as a “respectful modest muhajiba,” denoting that Alawadi covered her hair with a scarf in keeping with traditional Muslim customs.

Police spokesman Lt. Mark Coit said the investigation, in its early stages, was still broad, but did not rule out that the murder was a hate crime:

A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that. We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.

He added that the killing appeared to be an “isolated incident.”

The family friend Alzaidy told the San Diego paper that her father and Alawadi’s husband, al-Himidi, worked together for the U.S. Army:

Alzaidy said her father and Alawadi’s husband had previously worked together in San Diego as private contractors for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East.

Neighbors said the al-Himidi-Alawadi family left Iraq because they were “running away from war, running away from problems.”

A special report today by Reuters provides new evidence to bolster the U.S. and IAEA’s assessments that Iran hasn’t yet decided to pursue a nuclear weapon and has not reconstituted a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Most strikingly, Reuters has learned of an intercepted phone call in 2006 or 2007 in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran’s nuclear program, complains that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been stopped. The phone call helped form the backbone for a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in which American spy agencies expressed “high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2003.

The Reuters report finds that intelligence officials have a high-degree of confidence that Iran has no secret uranium enrichment sites and an Iranian decision to enrich uranium to weapons grade levels will be detected by U.S. intelligence and IAEA monitoring mechanisms.

“I think they are years away from having a nuclear weapon,” a U.S. administration official told Reuters.

Intelligence officials tell Reuters that they were aware for “years” of the construction of the secret Fordow uranium enrichment site and that “They had a deep understanding of the facility, which allowed them to blow the whistle on Tehran with confidence,” a U.S. official said. Iran claimed when the facility was exposed that they were not responsible for declaring it until the facility was fitted for and began nuclear work.

“We are very confident that there is no secret site now,” a U.S. administration official said, but admitted that Iran may attempt to construct another covert plant in the future.

Experts speaking to Reuters confirmed the IAEA’s analysis that Iran’s efforts to procure nuclear-related and dual-use equipment and the country’s large cache of ballistic missiles are examples of growing capabilities that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons.

The debate over air strikes, Israel’s anxieties about a nuclear-armed Iran and election-year politics have all contributed to comparisons with the Iraq war, a war justified by inaccurate intelligence data suggesting Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and unsubstantiated claims of significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst told Reuters:

There are lots of disturbing similarities. One has to note the differences, too. The huge difference being we don’t have an administration in office that is the one hankering for the war. This administration is not hankering for a war.

President Obama said recently that Iran with a nuclear weapon threatens the nonproliferation regime and U.S. and regional security. The Obama administration has ruled out a policy of containing a nuclear-armed Iran but has emphasized that a diplomatic solution is “the best and most permanent way” to relieve mounting tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.

I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.

The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.

Antony Blinken, Deputy Assistant, Office of the President; National Security Advisor, Office of the Vice President

Since the U.S. withdrawal in December, nearly every act of violence or political crisis has been interpreted as evidence that Obama should not have ended the war. Brookings Institute analyst Ken Pollack provided the basic narrative: the withdrawal has caused American influence in Iraq to decline “precipitously;” removed a stick with which to threaten Iraqi “bad guys” (with some commentators lamenting the lack of a stick to shake at Iran and Syria as well); and the military influence U.S. troops provided has not been replaced by political or economic influence. Or as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) put it, Iraq is “unraveling because we didn’t keep a residual force there.”

Last week, Antony Blinken, a deputy assistant to the president and National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden, refuted these allegations of defeat and lost influence in Iraq at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress.

Blinken noted that violence in Iraq remains at record lows despite widely reported terrorist attacks, shootings and other acts of violence. Fewer than 100 weekly security incidents occur today as compared with 1,600 at the height of the violence in 2007 and 2008.

Blinken recalled that the events of a 2007 political crisis in Iraq resemble one that began just after U.S. troops left Iraq in December, noting that in 2007, the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops on the ground there:

“In the end, the main difference between the two episodes was that in 2007/2008, the boycott lasted eight months — at a time when the United States had more than 150,000 troops on the ground. In 2012, we had no troops on the ground, and the boycott ended after less than two months.”

What’s more, Blinken argued, accusations that the United States has lost diplomatic influence in Iraq are baseless. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, James Jeffrey, has met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki nine times this year and movements from U.S. diplomatic posts have increased by a third over the last quarter of 2011.

And Iraq continues to make economic and diplomatic progress. Oil production is up to 2.7 million barrels a day versus 1.8 million in 2005. Saudi Arabia appointed its first ambassador to Iraq since 1990, Iraq has settled a number of outstanding debt issues with its neighbors, and Baghdad is preparing to host the Arab League summit this year.

While Blinken acknowledged Iraq continues to face problems that “will not be solved overnight,” he mentioned a series of steps the United States is taking to maintain progress in Iraq. The Strategic Framework Agreement signed at the end of 2008 that outlines areas of civil cooperation between Iraq and the U.S. is being implemented, with Biden and Maliki chairing its Higher Coordinating Committee last December. American assistance trained 1,700 Iraqi judges and judicial employees in 2010, and the United States funded and supported Iraq’s anti-corruption institutions. Finally, the U.S. is selling Iraq advanced weapons — F-16 fighters and M1 tanks — to enable Baghdad to defend itself against external threats.

“If that sounds less like a war-footing,” Blinken stated, “and more like the type of programs we have in countries around the world — that is exactly the point.”

As the United States seeks a “new, more normal relationship” with Iraq following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, it’s worth noting, as Blinken did, that over the last three years prognostications of doom and gloom offered by many conservatives — and “breathless, baseless accusations that American disengagement, or the absence of our military forces, was to blame” — have failed to materialize.

Violence continues to kill innocent Iraqis, and political crises in Baghdad are always around the corner. But the sort of steady, normal civilian-led relationship between Iraq and the United States the Obama administration is pursuing is the best way the United States can safeguard its interests in Iraq.

The last column of U.S. troops leaving Iraq crosses into Kuwait

In February 2002, George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman infamously wrote that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” But wars come at a high financial cost and the Iraq war was no exception. Through FY2011, the war has required $806 billion in federal funding and and total costs have been estimated between $3 – $5 trillion. The humanitarian cost is even more striking. Of the 4,804 coalition military fatalities, the U.S. military suffered 4,486 deaths. The toll on Iraqi civilians has been even higher. Between 105,722 and 115,485 Iraqi civilian deaths have been recorded and 2.8 million Iraqis have found themselves internally displaced by the war.

While the withdrawal from Iraq means an end, or at least a decrease, in some of these costs, the end of the Iraq war permits the U.S. to turn to other security challenges such as: restoring U.S. military readiness; expanding options to deal with other military threats in the Middle East; reducing the financial burden of the U.S. caused by the war; freeing up military resources to fight the Al Qaeda network; and rebalancing overall U.S. national security strategy to deal with real security threats. The withdrawal reflects the administration’s efforts to refocus the country’s national security strategy on the long-term U.S. national security interests of countering nuclear proliferation, worldwide nuclear arsenal reductions and the security of regional partners in Asia and the Middle East.

Returning veterans, as well, find that the costs of war remain high even when their tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have come to an end. Veterans face: growing economic inequalities; a struggling national economy; and a difficult job market. And, according to a whistleblower lawsuit, some of the nation’s biggest banks “defrauded veterans and taxpayers out of hundreds of million of dollars by disguising illegal gees in veterans’ home refinancing loans.”

Veterans also face attacks on their benefits such as GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s proposal to privatize veterans benefits. “The [Veterans of Foreign Wars] doesn’t support privatization of veterans health care,” VFW spokesperson Jerry Newberry told TPM. “This is an issue that seems to come around every election cycle.”

Speaking today, Obama cited the sacrifices made by veterans and called on the country to support its veterans:

Now, our nation reaffirms our commitment to serve veterans of Iraq as well as they served us — to uphold the sacred trust we share with all who have worn the uniform. Our future is brighter for their service, and today, we express our gratitude by saying once more: Welcome home.

A longer version of this post can be viewed in today’s Progress Report.

The President visits troops in Iraq last year

Demonstrating unshakable fortitude and unwavering commitment to duty, our men and women in uniform served tour after tour, fighting block by block to help the Iraqi people seize the chance for a better future. And on December 18, 2011, their mission came to an end.

More than 2 million U.S. troops served in the Iraq war, many of them on multiple deployments. According to CAP analysts Matt Duss and Peter Juul’s updated Iraq War Ledger, nearly 5,000 of them lost their lives, and more than 30,000 suffered injuries. By some estimates, those numbers could be much higher. A Time magazine article highlighted one such toll, traumatic brain injuries:

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), co-chairman of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force, has called Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) “the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Though no clear statistics exist for TBI, it is estimated that there are between 115,000 and 400,000 veterans who now suffer from at least mild versions of it.

Obama, in his statement, cited the sacrifices made in “wounds not always seen, but forever felt.” He issued a call to support veterans and their families:

Now, our Nation reaffirms our commitment to serve veterans of Iraq as well as they served us — to uphold the sacred trust we share with all who have worn the uniform. Our future is brighter for their service, and today, we express our gratitude by saying once more: Welcome home.

Indeed, the Defense Department is aggressively working on issues around traumatic brain injuries.

The Obama administration is also pushing for other government programs that work toward alleviating the burdens of veterans. Even as the numbers ease, vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan war are disproportionately represented among the unemployed. So the Obama administration has measures specifically targeting them embedded in its wider proposal for a jobs program.

Veteran care has a long way to go — homelessness, for instance, remains rampant among veterans. Creating a National Day of Honor is a good start.

The MEK's isignia

As of December, as shown in a YouTube video that has eluded widespread attention, Mitt Romney claimed to not know anything about the Mojahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), a controversial, exiled Iranian group listed by the State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization.” Asked during a campaign appearance about the group, Romney said he’d never heard of the group and asked what they were. Told of the MEK’s status, Romney asked indignantly, “Why would you think that I support a — you said it’s a terrorist group?”

As the questioner informed Romney, one of Romney’s foreign policy advisers — former Ambassador Mitchell Reiss — has been active in the very public, well-financed campaign to get the MEK off the terror list. Romney then replied:

I’ll take a look at the issue. I’m not familiar with that particular group, or that effort on the part of any of my team.

Watch the video of the exchange from December:

It might seem like a small and obscure issue, but the MEK has attracted much attention, including paid speeches by top American politicians and former officials here and in Europe, and multiple full-page newspaper adverts. Another Romney backer, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, has advocated forcefully on behalf of the MEK. More recently, NBC News did a long report on the group’s ties to terror activity in Iran. And the Treasury Department recently announced that it is investigating payments to prominent former American government officials to speak in support of the MEK.

Beyond the public attention, the Romney campaign has been engaged in the MEK issue well before his professed ignorance in December. Romney may not have been aware of it, but Reiss’s advocacy for the MEK was used by neoconservatives in the Romney camp to marginalize Reiss.

In a November GOP debate, Romney spoke of using Iranian “insurgent” groups. (The MEK is by far the best organized militant group opposed to the Islamic Republic.) The remark prompted the conservative Daily Caller website to make a number of inquiries to the campaign that went unanswered, and wrote that the campaign wouldn’t “clarify whether he was referring to the MEK, and what his position is on the organization.”

Now that three months have passed, Romney should make clear his grasp of MEK issues — which involve not only matters of Iran and Iraq policy, but also issues of terrorism — and stake out a position on the group. (HT: Matt Duss)

Iraqi NSA Fayad (L) and Syrian President Assad (R) in December

While many fellow Arab countries lined up against Assad — suspending, for example, Syria’s membership in the Arab League and demanding his removal from power — Iraq had taken a softer stance. This Summer, Iraqi Prime Minsiter Nouri al Maliki discouraged “sabotage” by Syrian protesters who’ve faced a brutal crackdown by authorities. By Autumn, reports emerged indicating “moral and financial” Iraqi support for Assad. In December, Fayad himself visited Assad as an envoy from Maliki’s government. Many analysts pointed to close ties between Iraq and Assad’s closest ally Iran — both countries dominated by Shia Muslims. In Syria, Assad’s minority Shiite Alawite sect rules over an overwhelmingly Sunni population.

But, as the violence in Syria drags on, those dynamics appear to be shifting one of Iraq’s top security official voiced support for the restive Syrian people. Fayad reportedly told Al-Riyadh:

We do not support the Syrian regime at any cost. We support reform and Syrians must have the political freedom to choose who rules them.

We stand completely with the aspirations of the Syrian people. We cannot hope for freedom and democracy (for ourselves) while denying [Syrians]. But frankly, we have not seen a scenario for resolving [the crisis].

The statements, if reflective of an official government position, would draw Iraq closer to the position of its wealthy Gulf Arab neighbors. The Iraqi statement does not match the aggressiveness of Guld Arab regimes in calling for Assad’s removal from power, nor their sometimes flirtation with military intervention, but nonetheless could signal a shift away from Iraqi support for Assad in the face of Arab initiatives to resolve the crisis.

Last week, Iraqi officials told McClatchy that violence in their country had dropped because Al Qaeda-aligned fighters were moving into Syria to violently oppose the Assad regime. The report tracks with warnings by U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper earlier this month that recent dramatic explosions in the Syrian capital Damascus were bombings carried out by migrating Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters.

An Iraqi shift away from supporting Assad would be coming just two days after the militant Islamist movement Hamas, which is considered a terror group by the U.S., voiced its support for Syrian anti-government demonstrators — signaling a possible shift away from the group’s patrons in Iran.

Over the past week, journalists have raised the alarm about the increasing carelessness of the mainstream media in hyping the calls for war with Iran. But Fox News commentator and The Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson openly called for war against Iran and argued for the full-scale annihilation of the Islamic Republic during an appearance on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. Carlson responded to a question about U.S. military action:

CARLSON: I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.

Carlson, having called for the annihilation of Iran — a country with a population of over 74 million people — went on to acknowledge that “we should assess what will happen to the price of energy were we to do that.” Watch the clip:

Carlson doesn’t bother to make a case for why the U.S. should destroy Iran. But presumably he’s referring to the crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. However, neither the IAEA nor U.S. intelligence reports conclude that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. The IAEA and U.S. intelligence have expressed concerns about possible military aspects to Iran’s nuclear program and suspicions about Iran’s program intensified after Tehran refused IAEA inspectors access to facilities thought to be used for tests on how to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran also refused to agree to a process by which it would address IAEA concerns about “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear program.

But, much as in the case of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, many journalists and politicians are ignoring the facts on the ground and pushing forward with calls for increasingly aggressive actions. Carlson, however, may stand alone in publicly calling for Iran’s outright annihilation.

But what made Shadid’s work most powerful for me was the stories he wrote about about people going on with their lives even under pressure that would be unfathomable, and shattering, to Americans forced to endure it. There was as much moral force to his stories about checkpoints, and shawarma sellers as there was to his portraits and analysis of intractable dictators. And taken together, those pieces demanded that readers recognize that the places Americans only saw as strategic considerations were in fact worlds as full, and rich as their own. Here are 20 great stories from Shadid that captured the changing dynamics of the Middle East, from Iraq’s leaders in self-reflection to the cheery persistance of a Jordanian coffee-seller:

Civil Society: In 2010, Shadid chronicled Iraqi leaders’ profound self-doubt and their reflections about the failure to build a stable regime there. In 2011, he visited a hospital in Libya staffed by volunteers, more than 100 of whom came from overseas to participate in the changes underway in the country. And in 2008, Shadid examined the alternative societies of Jordan’s long-term refugee camps and the hopelessness of the residents’ attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Commerce: During the Egyptian Revolution, Shadid used the death of a prominent member to reflect on the limitations of Egypt’s patronage economy. In 2009, Shadid spent two hours at a shawarma stand in Baghdad run by Bahloul Younes. He analyzed the scene at the Bab al-Yemen market in Sanaa, a city that’s grown from tends of thousands to two million.

Transportation: Shadid bridged the Middle East’s colonial past and its future on the train from Baghdad to Basra. He parsed the desires of Iraqis in the graffiti they left at Baghdad checkpoints. Shadid spent the day with a coffee- and tea-seller who sets up shop on a critical stretch of highway in Jordan. In 2008, he examined the roles that Baghdad’s walls play in the city’s transportation routes and emotional geography. And when the Syrian government denied Shadid a visa after a 2005 story that angered them, Shadid ended up going over water to Lebanon and experiencing the tricky world of Middle Eastern sea transport for himself.

Culture: A month before his death, Shadid checked in on the United Arab Emirates’ commitment to a plan to build three enormous museums. He parsed the cultural artifacts that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would leave behind, from fairytales of American soldiers to the rise of tattoos as a positive cultural marker. Shadid broke down how the controversy over the Dutch newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad grew out of control. He visited librarians in Beirut who were committed to making banned and so-called offensive volumes available to their readers, and profiled the editor of Dubai’s al-Arabiya news channel.

Faith: In 2011, Shadid traced the changes in a crowded Egyptian neighborhood once known as the Islamic Republic of Imbaba to explain the role of faith in the Egyptian Revolution—and later looked at how the Muslim Brotherhood was building a base of political support by providing city services. He analyzed how Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had used threats of an Islamist rising in a Libyan port town to gain Western support, and then explored the town’s balance between the secular and the religious. And he reflected on the role of Arab Christians in a Middle East in the process of dramatically reshaping itself.

Through the years, he says he has learned to think carefully before he speaks out on issues, but that makes his commitment to some causes all the more courageous. His criticism of the war in Iraq made him a highly controversial figure in the early 2000s. “They did a half-hour show on Fox saying my career was over, and there was a cover of one of those magazines with the word ‘traitor’ written on it, and the White House was passing out a deck of weasels and I was on one of the cards,” he recalls. After initial anger, there was a brief moment when he felt afraid. “I called my dad and said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ And he said, ‘Grow up. You’ve got money. You’ve got a job. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, “But don’t say bad things about me.” ‘ And he was right.”

Even more precisely, I think it’s that you can’t expect both that your endorsement of a cause or position will mean something and then also expect that people will not react to that endorsement as if it carries weight. I don’t think that the only way for artists to be of service to their politics is for them to validate politicians and policies with their constituencies—they have independent ideas to offer about framing and policy. But recognizing, when you have a lot of power, that you speak from a privileged position, is always smart and classy.

In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.

The Mirage also has a vision of a decidedly more moderate global Islam: is there more we could be doing in politics and popular culture to be supportive of moderate interpretations of Islam?

If you give people freedom of conscience, you’re going to get more moderate versions of religion. It’ll take a while. Part of what drives extreme conservativism in relgiion is people are afraid to voice alternate views…if you can go to jail or be killed for voicing a unorthodox opinion… I don’t see anything incompatible in Islam, as I don’t in Christianity, with gay rights or women’s rights. It’s more do with people having breathing room.

Similarly, the way we talk about acts of terrorism committed by people inspired by their Christian beliefs is very different than the way we talk about terrorists who are inspired by Islam. Do you think we should be looking more carefully at things like attacks on abortion providers?

I think you always tend to be much more forgiving of the behavior, even the bad behavior, of people you are more familiar and comfortable with. I don’t think it’s an exact parallel, but the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a Christian war would trouble a lot of people. But obviously it was launched by George Bush, who was asked ‘who’s your favorite philosopher?’ in one of the debates, and he said ‘my favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ.’ People are going to assume that anything you do is essentially a Christian act. If you launch a war, even with the best intentions, that kills thousands of people, a lot of people are going to look at that as Christian terrorism.

A lot of it is being able to put yourself in the mindset of people on the receiving end of violence…[When Christians commit violence, people are able to think] ‘they’re bad, but they’re not representative of what Christianity is supposed to be.’ What are you familiar with? Who are your friends? Does the violence affect you and people you care about? And all of that goes into the calculation of what gets labeled terrorism?…Any religion that lasts for more than 1,000 years and flourished in hundreds of different cultures is going ot have to be pretty adaptable to local traditions and is going to have to speak to you in times of peace and times of war…To condemn an entire religion that way, or to do the other thing and say the violence doesn’t count because the real expression is when we’re being nice, that doesn’t work either.

I think part of the problem, too, with a lot of portrayals of Islam on television and in movies, is if you’ve only got one character who is meant to represent the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims, no actor is good enough to capture all that diversity. The only way to represent a religion organically is to having multiple characters practicing the faith each in their own way, and to go about their lives being Muslim. Which was part of what I was after. I didn’t want to have to say, oviously Osama bin Laden is a bad example of Islam. I wanted to be obvious that what sets him apart from other people in the story is he’s a mass murderer.

I’d love to hear how you developed your characters. One of the things I’ve found really frustrating about popular culture is how it’s essentially failed to provide a pushback to the stereotypical depictions of Muslims as terrorists, and how we haven’t had iconic representations of Muslims that are the equivalent of the Cosbys or tropes like the sassy gay best friend to defuse any anxiety people may feel about having Muslims as friends, neighbors, or even intermarrying into their families.

This was originally a pitch for a TV pilot. It came out of a more general desire to tell a story about 9/11 and the U.S. response ot it. I’m a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I wanted to do something like that where you set up a genre universe where along the way you explore these different issues in a metaphorical or a less direct way, as part of telling a really exciting story. The other thing on my wish list was to give a more central role to the Iraqis who were bearing the brunt of the War on Terror, who got committed to sidekick status or not mentioned at all. I wanted to do this more organic portrait of Islam and get away from it as a problem religion. Because I’m also a big science fiction geek, I hit on this idea of turning the world upside down, and not just the geopolitical situation, but even the idea of who the center of the story should be. Who constitues a protagonist. This is a universe wehre not only are Muslims the center of the universe, but when you turn on TV, you’d expect the elite to be an Arab Muslim, you’d expect the Christians to be the sad sidekicks, the people who remind you that, yes the people in the third world are humans too.

I just started putting together the characters. I was creating the classic thriller setup. You’ve got your main character, Mustafa, who has the tragic marriage, but in his case because they have polygamy, he’s got more than one. His loveable sidekick, who is there for comic relief, is Samir…Amal is the scrappy new recruit who’s got to prove herself. That was the core of the story, and I built out from there.

One of the basic rules was that people’s characters would not be fundamentally altered. Osama in Laden would be more a respectable political figure who was doing dastardly things behind the scenes. Originally, Saddam Hussein was going to be more of a recurring character. But it made sense that he would be a gangster. A number of the biopics about Saddam tend to do the same thing, they portray him as the Al Capone. And of course the Muslim war on drugs would be a war on alcohol.

There was the central conceit of the mirage. Apart from being a neat twist that you could build off of [it was a reminder that] your place in history, at the top of the pyramid of power, is not assured. If the world is turned over once, it could turn over again, and you should maybe build your ethics on the idea that you’ll be on the bottom some day or you’ll be in need of mercy…If you took Americans and you put them in a position where they believe they should be at the top, and instead, had been humiliated and put at the bottom, the rage that would evolve from that is probably not that different than the rage that comes out of the Middle East. They’ve been on the receiving end for a long time. Certainly guys like [Ayman al-]Zawahiri are oppressed, they’re mad. The Mirage was part of the way at getting at some of that mindless violence.

Do you think significant culture change is possible? The book is a very funny, pointed warning for folks who think they can alter the course of history and civilizations easily, but I’m not sure that answers the question of whether those world-historical forces can be altered at all?

History is in part a series of human decisions, but it’s also a series of accidents. It’s not so much that we can’t change hsitory or affect it, but we overestimate our ability to do it and to do it quickly. Desire often gets ahead of reason…If you’re happy with the way your society works, it’s natural to assume this is the way it should work for everybody. Something that drives this adventure of we’ll go into Iraq, and take out the dictator, and democracy will flourish, and that’s the end point of history for everybody, that ignores that history works differently for everybody…It’s not that I don’t hope that Iraq and other countries will eventually have a robust democracy. But part of it is having a robust democracy for long enough that people don’t want to return to dictatorship. In America, we haven’t had a king for over 200 years, so if you tried to set up a monarchy, you’d be faced with a collective disbelief of 300 million people. That interia protects us from more obvious forms of despotism.