Minderbindering

The world's fastest land animal? The cheetah.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad Chief for the Washington Post, just gave a talk about Iraq at the Harvard Book Store. Here's just a taste of the luscious goodness (or, should we say, the horrifying surrealism) of his new book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Witness the U.S. Army, attempting to "secure" Uday Hussein's "menagerie":

As I stepped out of the Republican Palace, Lieutenant Peppers called after me. "Hey, you want to see the animals?"

We headed to a neighboring palace in a humvee, driving along the banks of the Tigris where, just two days earlier, Peppers's battalion had fought against soldiers from Saddam's Special Republican Guard. When we arrived, Peppers led the way through knee-high weeds to a fenced enclosure. "Let's see," he said. "We have seven lions, two cheetahs, and one brown bear." The adorable lions were not quite cubs, but not yet full grown. (Before the war, I heard that Uday, Saddam's elder son, would drive around Baghdad in a Rolls-Royce with lion cubs on his lap.) The bear cowered in the shade. The temperature was already in the nineties -- and it was only April. I wondered how he'd survive the summer. And the cheetahs...where were they? I called out to Peppers. He couldn't see them, either. Alarmed, he grabbed his radio and summoned his men from the Humvee. "Be ready with your guns," he barked. "We may have two cheetahs on the loose."

A dozen soldiers swooped around Uday's menagerie, switching off the safeties on their M16 rifles. Then we saw the two spotted adolescent cheetahs skulking out of a small shed inside the enclosure. Everyone chuckled. Rifles were clicked back into safe mode and slung over shoulders.

When the soldiers had arrived at the palace, the animals appeared to be dying of hunger and thirst. The groundskeepers who fed them had apparently fled. The soldiers brought the animals water but they didn't know what to do for food. Then one sergeant found a bunch of sheep in a pen, and he tossed one into the enclosure. It was mealtime.

But the supply of sheep was running low. A conversation about the Geneva Conventions ensued. What obligation does an occupying military power have to care for animals? Nobody knew. Peppers didn't want the animals to starve. He figured he could sneak some military rations to them for a few days, until help arrived. He'd heard that hundreds of American civilians were coming to run the country.

"They'll have the answers," he said.

A discussion about the Geneva Conventions -- how quaint. Milo Minderbinder couldn't have done much better than that -- except he would have bought the rations from the Marine Corps at 5 cents a can, and sold them to the cheetahs for a profit at 3 cents a can.