Live From the Daura Oil Refinery

We set up a table near a large steel water container in the school where I was teaching English this morning. The children had been chanting, "Down with USA" but their teacher had told them that not all Americans were like their president. Some Americans were human shields, here at the oil refinery, hoping to deter the American war machine from turning this place into a Haliburton rebuilding contract.

Ben deals first. Ben, Abby, and I are the only ones from the regular game. Wendy wasn't able to take time off work. Going to Iraq during wartime is like taking permanent leave. Even if we survive the bombing they'll probably arrest us for aiding and abetting the enemy, we'll spend the next couple of years in Guatanamo Bay, twenty miles off-shore from our homeland. We wouldn't be the first American citizens this year refused access to a lawyer and held in secret confinement, we won't be the last.

Abby wins the first several hands. She pulls trips on the river against Ben's pocket aces. Fifty dinars get her an extra card when she draws an open four in the sixth inning during baseball. She takes high and low in Omaha with an A through five wheel. Omaha, that's pretty close to Texas. Lots of oil companies in Texas.

"This rules," Abby says, her chips piling toward her collarbone. I have to cash in with another fifty-thousand dinar. Ben hardly says anything. He's been depressed since we got here.

Abby is ordering her stacks along color lines when it's her turn to deal. "Throw some skins √Àœ«¡ «·”¯ﬂ¯—," I say.

"What did you call me?" she asks.

"It's Arabic."

"I know it's Arabic. The first word means sugar. What's the second word mean?"

"Just play."

This could be our last poker game. It's like the poker game at the end of the world, with the highest stakes imaginable. Bush has given the UN twenty-four hours to agree to war. The UN has said a unilateral strike on Iraq goes against its charter. Soon the UN won't be around anymore. The Daura Oil Refinery was one of the first targets bombed in 1991, Saddam's government is sure it is going to be hit again. We had wanted to go to schools or shelters and act as shield for the civilian population, but a week ago Dr. Al-Hasimi in a meeting with all of the volunteer shields at the Palestine Hotel ordered all of us to military targets or we were to leave the country immediately. Donahue, Jensen, and Gideon split for the Jordanian border. Brock wrote a short poem then high-tailed after them. Abby, Ben and I decided to stick it out. That a bomb hits this installation is the most likely way we are going to die. But there are other ways. After the bombs fall, decimating Baghdad's five million occupants, leaving them without homes or water, their rage might turn against us. We could be victims of mob violence. The new rulers of Iraq, presuming Saddam is disposed, could have us executed for supporting the old regime. Our odds of getting out of here are slim. All in all, this was a bad bet.

Will they care more when American civilians die, like poor Rachel Corrie in Rafa. The leaders of this world make mince-meat out of the unarmed. Gandhi was a fluke; most peaceful protests have failed. I push three blue chips on a suicide king and a hanging four. Ben and Abby fold. It bothers me that this is my last game and Abby is winning. I have a right to win my last game of poker. Abby's victory here proves to a moral certainty that this world isn't fair.

The air sirens go off across the city and we pause for a second and Ben says, plus fifty, and we get back to our game. I want to tell Ben that I'm sorry for stealing his padded vest, but I'm not, so I don't tell him that. The worst part of this is that we don't even know if we're doing the right thing. Nobody will actually know until after the war the war's consequences. Conservative to liberal, somewhere between ten-thousand and half a million civilians will die in the first wave of bombing. I could be wrong to be here, like when I campaigned for Nader, saying there was no difference between Bush and Gore. Then Bush came into office and scrapped the Kyoto treaty, proving my mistake almost immediately.

But in 1996, if I had campaigned for Nader I would have been right. They said the same thing then, that Nader was going to give the election to Dole. Those were the same people. The democrats like to talk about the time they were right in 2000, but not the time they were wrong in 1996. Nobody knows anything with certainty, everybody likes to say "I told you so." World War I was supposed to last two months. War is like the green spaces on a roulette wheel, outside of most bets. In the end you have your instincts, the information you can glean from whatever news sources you decide to trust. You make your choices. I don't trust Bush. I don't believe him when he says Saddam finances "Al Qaeda like" organizations. What does "Al-Qaeda like" mean? What standards are used in declaring someone "Al-Qaeda-ish"? And when they say Saddam was trying to procure uranium and the New York Times reports the documents they used turned out to be forgeries. The ironic thing is that I might not have been against this war, I'm not sure. I'm certainly not pro-Saddam. And with 60,000 Iraqis dying yearly we had to do something. It seems to me a different president could have convinced me this was the right thing to do.

I don't want to die. I don't want to go without a say in this crazy war. I've been in touch with every famous person I know. I've asked Dave Eggers, ZZ Packer, and Tobias Wolff to write letters on my behalf asking the U.S. to please not blow up this stupid refinery while Stephen Elliott is in it. It's like Sartre and Genet, on a larger scale.

Ben lays down a heart flush. His first win in a while. He's missing Wendy, and I feel bad for him. He used to be a pretty good player. On the next hand, though I'm sitting on the nuts, I fold into the pot just to increase his stack. Money is an issue of faith, treaties as good as the people that sign them. The economy is a myth; these chips mean nothing.

We pack up the cards when we hear the planes motoring toward us, carrying the sound barrier on their noses. Abby does her little, I'm the big winner dance, which strikes me as ironic, but what the hell. I bite my tongue instead of telling her she got lucky. We cross the unlit street back into the installation, and wait to see what the world does next.

Stephen Elliott

Editor, The Poker Report

****

Editorial note: none of this is actually true. except the stuff about Ben being sick with love for Wendy. Also, the stuff I said about not trusting George Bush is true. The information on the Daura Refinery was cribbed from John Ross' excellent column in the Bay Guardian, http://www.sfbg.com.

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