When University politics professor Ezra Suleiman was born in Iraq in 1941, it was still possible that Nazis would reach his country and kill him.
When he speaks about the looming war with Iraq today, he knows his current home is poised to invade his former home.
Suleiman, now a top American scholar of European politics, describes Iraq, home to countless generations of his Jewish family, as prone to violence but possibly suited to democracy. He thinks war is inevitable, but that the Bush administration's goal of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime quickly and setting up a stable democracy is overly optimistic.
"It ignores the impact of history, the impact of religion, the impact of ethnic conflict," he said in an interview. "I don't think there is something in Arabic culture that is antithetical to democracy. There may be obstacles, but so there were in many countries."
Suleiman was born and spent his childhood in Basra, Iraq, a humid, flat port city in the south once home to one of the oldest Arab Jewish communities in the world. The city was destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and in the Gulf war of 1991, and today contains almost no Jews.
"As a child of three or four, you could sense the atmosphere of danger and the anti-Semitism that existed," Suleiman said. "I always, as a child, had to be careful. You always feared a knock at the door."
Suleiman's eight years in Iraq and his close ties to it give him a perspective on the country few other Americans and University members have.
In 1948, after the birth of Israel as a Jewish state, Iraq passed laws taking away Jews' citizenship and preparing for their departure. The Suleiman family decided to stay, but the children were sent to boarding school in England.
Suleiman still speaks the distinct dialect of Arabic that only Iraqi Jews knew, one they had to adjust when speaking to Muslims.
Thinking through terror
Thirty minutes into the new day on Sept. 12, 2001, a telephone rang in Suleiman's hotel room in Paris. He was on his way back from Germany to the United States, exhausted and haplessly trying to get in touch with his family.
It was on that day, Suleiman now thinks it is clear, that the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq.
An editor of France's major newspaper, Le Monde, was calling to ask him to pen a column on the previous day's attacks. Suleiman agreed.
In the piece he argued that though terrorists have accused the United States of being an empire, it has been too ambivalent about using force to be considered one.
In March 2003, however, his view may be changing.
"Maybe that's what they're trying to be now," he said.
While he thinks war will now happen under unfavorable circumstances, he is more concerned about what comes after. He sees Saddam as a figure rooted in a lineage of violence that has marked Iraqi society for decades.
Violence and democracy
In 1958, a violent military revolution overthrew King Faisal II of Iraq, and a Ba'athist group took power ten years later in another violent coup. There have been few years in recent Iraqi history not full of bedlam and violence.
"Saddam Hussein has simply taken the worst aspects of Iraqi society — violence, discrimination — to the extreme," Suleiman said.
He blamed the violence partially on Iraq being an "artificial" country where religious "tribal" groups vie for power. In 1932, Iraq became an independent state after 12 years under British mandate.
Effectively balancing these groups, he said, will be key to setting up a stable democracy.
Kurds make up about 20 percent of the population and dominate the north, Sunni Muslims make up about 30 percent and dominate the center and government and Shiite Muslims make up the remaining 50 percent in the south.
Suleiman is hopeful, yet skeptical, that Iraq will be able to overcome its violent past.
"Maybe they will have learned something, and will learn it cannot be all or nothing, and that they have to share power," he said "I am not entirely convinced."
It was difficult to reconcile the violence with Iraq's former position as one of the wealthiest and most modern states in the Middle East.
"It was always hard for me to square these signs of modernity with the signs of backwardness and violence," Suleiman said. "There are these two facets to Iraq, and for the last 20 odd years, we have seen the really horrible side of it."
U.S. policy
Suleiman suggests that U.S. policy hasn't taken into account the importance of prestige and honor in Iraqi politics and society. Saddam may be a "sociopath," he said, but the United States errs when it fails to "leave the door open" for him to change policy.
"The surest way to make sure he doesn't comply with anything is to keep on adding on and forcing him to comply," Suleiman said. "And every time he makes the slightest concession, you say he is basically acting, which, of course, enrages him even further and makes him go back into his shell."
Suleiman thinks Iraqis will be happy to see Saddam gone. "But then what?" he asks. "That is my big question"
He fears America, occupying a Muslim country, will be a lightening rod for terrorists, making U.S. sites in Iraq and elsewhere prime targets.
A man and a world
It could be said that Suleiman embodies parts of the entire conflict. An American and a native Iraqi, he is Jewish and grew up in America's closest ally, Britain.
But he is a European political specialist and has received the highest honors of America's greatest opponent in the proposed war, France. His skin is olive, and he speaks English with a guttural Middle Eastern accent tinted by a touch of pristine British distinction. This term, he is co-teaching a new course on European politics and society in the 20th century.
Suleiman is disturbed that the United States seems ready to go to war without many allies. He said the crux of the American-European disagreement is that the United States thinks destabilizing the Middle East by attacking Iraq will remodel the region with democracies, while Europeans worry about the effects of destabilization and prefer the present situation.
He has gained his expertise not only through his cultural experiences, but, beginning in 1960, through his study at Harvard and Columbia universities and his teaching at the University and prestigious European schools.
He was originally planning to go to the London School of Economics, but by chance ended up in the states. After his father was imprisoned in Iraq on serious political charges in Suleiman's last year of high school, the family "thought it was the end." His father got out, however, and left permanently.
"They were very attached to their homeland," Suleiman said. "They were among the last Jews to leave."
But between 1950 and 1960, Suleiman, who didn't speak any English or know anybody when he arrived in Britain, communicated with his family in Iraq through letters, which were always censored.
He only saw his parents every two to three years in England.
Never wholly free of home
"Despite this strong attachment that my family had to their country, the country did not want us and showed that in many, many ways, and so I don't feel any ties, if you will, because that country chose to cut the umbilical chord," Suleiman said. "I don't have this hatred and don't feel like an exile wanting to go back."
Though Suleiman is no longer tied to Iraq, the family that lived there has brought their experiences here.
When the family comes together, they speak Arabic. His mother, who lives in Chicago, cooks Arabic food. When Suleiman speaks of Iraq, a certain nostalgia permeates his language, almost a frustration at how his homeland has turned out.
"All of our sentences were a mixture of Arabic and English," he said of family conversations. "You are always a child of where you are born."
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