Not long before the bombs and missiles began to rain on Baghdad, three men from the Iraqi opposition in exile were summoned to the Oval Office to meet their putative liberator. As they later explained to friends and associates, they found the experience a little unnerving in view of President Bush's ignorance about the country he was preparing to invade. He was intrigued, for example, to learn that Iraqi Muslims are divided between two branches of Islam, Shiite and Sunni. The rest of us have come to expect such vacuity, but in fact most Americans are not that far ahead of the chief executive in general knowledge about Iraq. Hence Joseph Braude's little book, The New Iraq, could fill a useful function, given its plentiful supply of interesting facts and observation on what is now our colony. Where else, for example, are we likely to learn that the Iraqis commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957 to build Baghdad's first opera house (the job was canceled after a coup), that the early Mesopotamian ruler Sargon of Akkad started life as a landscape gardener, or that the hit series on Iraqi TV in the 1990s was Wolves of the Night, the saga of a Baghdad gang in which the individual members were portrayed as "ordinary people responding to extraordinary hardship by doing what they must to get by."

Close examination of his text indicates that Braude, despite frequent travels to the region as a management consultant, has apparently never actually been to Baghdad, a fact he artfully elides. Nevertheless, his diligent offshore researches have yielded a portrait of the country as it existed before George Bush began liberating it that is a lot more interesting than reports at the time from most Baghdad-based correspondents.

Early on, Braude quotes Edward Said to the effect that Americans "are profoundly unaware of the society that has persisted beneath Saddam's vast shadow." Like Saddam himself, the outside world persisted in casting all of Iraqi society as a reflection of the dictator, ignoring the degree to which he had failed to stamp it into conformity. Followers of the revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani outside Iraq e-mailed their requests for guidance to Iran, whence they were smuggled across the frontier to Najaf for consideration by the Shiite sage, whose answers were smuggled out again to the nearest point where they could be translated onto the Internet. In Basra, meanwhile, there flourished a snake charmer who made magical ointments and potions out of venom--a vestige of an ancient Mesopotamian cult.

No less pertinently, Braude points out that the Iraq that evolved under the privations of the 1990s was not "the Iraq that émigrés from the 1960s, and 1970s remember...a country enriched with oil and legitimate business and employment opportunities for most of its citizens." Sanctions-era Iraq was a country of 600,000 war widows, many of whom joined the stream of prostitutes that emerged as one of Iraq's principal exports in this period. It was also the land of "the cats of the embargo," as the local profiteers who fattened on the cruel economics of the UN blockade were known.

Braude's apparent sensitivity to the impact of the embargo on Iraqi society is all the more curious given his respect for various hawks who not only supported the sanctions policy but actively campaigned for the catastrophe of the US invasion and occupation. New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, for example, a fanatical Zionist who never met a cruise missile aimed at an Iraqi he didn't like, is fawningly eulogized in the acknowledgments for "his prescient comments and advice...a source of constant strength."

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