American's 'Kismet' approach to Iraq
By George H. Rosen
Editorial
The Boston Globe
1/25/2003
SEARCHING for a trace of Iraq in the history of America's popular imagination is, for the most part, digging a dry well. For one thing, the modern country dates only from the end of World War I, before which its current territory was split among three Ottoman provinces. But even Baghdad, the most storied name of the region, has been only a marginal mosquito in America's mythologizing.
Mark Twain, who went nearly everywhere he could in the world, never made it there. Although, in Damascus once, as Twain recounts in his ''Innocents Abroad,'' he dreamed of magic carpets flying toward Baghdad during a particularly romantic dusk.
The one Baghdad story that Americans have taken to heart - or at least consistently spent money to see - is ''Kismet,'' Edward Knoblock's 1911 ''Arabian Nights'' melodrama of a wily beggar, a capricious caliph, and an evil wazir. The play was a smash hit for 30 years for actor Otis Skinner and has been transformed into four movie versions and a Broadway musical comedy. ''Kismet'' is the source of the image of Baghdad as a metropolis of licentiousness - '' Not Since Nineveh! '' goes the song - that has fed the gossip columns of ''Baghdad on the Hudson'' (Manhattan) and ''Baghdad by the Bay'' (San Francisco).
It is particularly in Robert Wright and George Forrest's 1953 transmogrification of ''Kismet'' into Broadway musical schlock (the source of the hit song ''Stranger in Paradise'') that we hit the paydirt of prescience about our current predicament. ''Baghdad! Don't underestimate Baghdad!'' sings Lalume, the gorgeous and persistently dirty-minded wife of the wazir. ''You must investigate Baghdad!''
She goes on to reveal secrets of court life not unlike those recently uncovered by Saddam's former mistress (the dictator's favorite movie is ''The Godfather,'' his favorite song, Sinatra singing ''Strangers in the Night'') on network TV.
Could Lalume, who in the name of decency and a fondness for the lead baritone betrays her ruthless husband, be a promising omen for a postattack revolt in Baghdad by freedom-loving Iraqis? It's not the first time the idea has come up. In the 1944 movie of ''Kismet'' Lalume - her legs painted a Technicolor gold - was played by Hollywood's most celebrated anti-Nazi German, Marlene Dietrich.
Are there other auguries we can find for ourselves, given that ''Kismet,'' from the Arabic via Turkish, means ''fate''? George W. could well take heart at seeing how easily his predecessor (assuming Bush identifies with the wily beggar/lead baritone) handles the chief bad man in Broadway's Baghdad.
In the musical, the wazir is definitely on the axis of evil. Just as Saddam, again according to that former mistress, watches videotapes of his tortured enemies, the wazir gleefully sings of ''the time we caught the man who said I wasn't nice'':
Joy oh joy, that was a time!
We confiscated his mother And then did something or other
Involving her dissolving
in a vat of lime!
But in Kismet the evil wazir goes down more easily than even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz would dare predict of the current Iraqi strongman. The lead baritone (Alfred Drake on Broadway) drowns him in the palace swimming pool. The misled, but handsome, caliph - maybe Uday Hussein, Saddam's son who publishes a recently banned newspaper that has dared to be critical of his father's regime? - then marries the lead baritone's daughter; the lead baritone goes off with the not-too-bereaved Dietrich figure, and all is well. Talk about targeted assassination and instantaneous regime change!
The evil wazir, by the way, was sung on a recent revival recording by the genial comedian Dom DeLuise. No, he can't sing. So, we have Curly the cowboy from ''Oklahoma,'' George Bush from the Crawford ranch, or even a deputized Donald Rumsfeld, who was a high school wrestler, versus DeLuise. A righteous lead baritone fights a bad but ludicrous wazir. Clearly, a walkover.
There is, however, some disturbing reading in the ''Kismet'' tea leaves. When the wazir crows about his interrogation procedures - ''they always begin to remember when I begin to dismember'' - one begins to think a little too uncomfortably about ''patriot'' acts, secret arrests, and what may be going on by Guantanamo Bay.
And even in a Broadway Baghdad, there are complications. ''Kismet'' may be a frivolous version of an ''Arabian Nights'' story, but the Arabian Nights were not really all that Arabian. The stories Sheherazade told her sultan husband to keep him from cutting off her head were collected in Arabic, but their roots are thought to be Persian - in Iran - and perhaps even Hindu. Moreover, Wright and Forrest, composers of ''Kismet,'' took their show's ''oriental'' melodies from the Russian composer Alexander Borodin.
Behind a lone lunatic wazir in musical-comedy Baghdad is really a complicated network of relationships and influences in a world - Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan - that we in our current fairy tale seem barely to understand. The administration's bellicose clerks wave the bloody flag of Saddam's gassing of the Kurds to chastize those who don't, as the president says, have enough ''steel in their spine'' for war.
Yet when Saddam was actually raining chemical weapons on Kurdish land in 1987 and 1988, it was the Reagan administration, in which nearly every current Bush hawk served, that called the idea of US sanctions against Iraq ''premature'' and granted Saddam a billion-dollar loan, supposedly as a counterweight to the Soviets and Iranian influence.
What a look at the ''Kismet'' Broadway version of Baghdad really provides is not an opportunity to grasp at straws, but an illustration of our profound ignorance of the real city and people we plan to attack and our reliance, after decades of inattention, on fragmentary information and stereotypes. It shows just how desperately we need some caution and intelligence - military, political, and moral - before we plunge into an abyss of our own ignorance and fancy.
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George H. Rosen is the author of the novel ''Black Money.''
© Copyright 2003 Boston Globe Newspaper Company.
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