In The Face Of Death

As a child in the 1950s, decades before Saddam Hussein took power, Hazim Hanna loved going to American movies in his northern Iraq hometown of Mosul. He wrote fan letters to his favorite Hollywood stars in schoolboy English and eagerly collected autographs from such actors as John Wayne, Robert Ford and the young Ronald Reagan. Their films provided far more than entertainment to the youngster, a relative says; they were "his bridge to the outside world." In Baghdad nearly a half century later, Hanna and his devoted wife of nearly 40 years, Emel Meskoni (the given name means "hope"), welcomed the 2003 U.S. invasion that overthrew Saddam's brutal regime. "In spite of the chaos, they felt that their dignity was restored," their son recalls. Hanna and Meskoni became two of the first Iraqis to work as translators at the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in 2004, and were acknowledged as two of the best. Within a decade or so, Hanna predicted, Iraq would be "like Dubai"—a showcase of prosperity and progress.

Instead, Iraq fell apart. Although Hanna and his wife never stopped expressing hope for their country, they were waiting for final approval to immigrate to the United States when kidnappers grabbed him, then her, this past May. A message appeared on an Islamist Web site in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq, a front organization for Al Qaeda in Iraq, trumpeting the killing of "two of the most prominent agents and spies of the worshippers of the Cross … a man and woman who occupy an important position at the U.S. Embassy." On July 8 the U.S. Embassy publicly announced that their bodies had been found and identified. The next day Ambassador Ryan Crocker sent an impassioned memo urging Washington to speed up the handling of immigrant visas for Iraqis. A senior administration official, asking not to be named on such a touchy subject, says the process is so slow because the Department of Homeland Security is creating "a logjam."

Even vehement opponents of the war in Iraq worry about the violence a pullout would unleash against defenseless Iraqis. Sitting beside Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Crocker made that case last week before Congress. "I am certain that abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts [in Iraq] will bring failure, and the consequences of such a failure must be clearly understood," he said. "An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering—well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq's borders." He is hardly alone in his worries—particularly for Iraqis who have tried to help rebuild the country. "We genuinely are concerned about what happens when we leave," says the security manager of an American contracting firm in Baghdad, speaking on background to avoid increasing the risk to his Iraqi staff. "They're marked people." A prominent Baghdad-based human-rights official, who is not authorized to speak to the media, puts it even more bluntly: "It's going to be a bloodbath."

The murders of Hanna and his wife capture the moral quandary many Americans are feeling about the war: a better Iraq seems plainly out of reach, and yet a worse one seems all too possible if we leave now. Hanna and Meskoni were the kind of people you would look for to build a nation—smart and stubborn and proud. Violence and fear have driven more than 2 million Iraqis into exile, and the International Organization for Migration says roughly 2.2 million others have been displaced inside the country, but the couple could not stand the thought of abandoning their Baghdad home. "Terrorists will take my house," Hanna told relatives who urged him to leave. He was especially proud of his huge library. "He built his house, as we say in Iraq, brick by brick," says Hanna's former office mate at the embassy, Serwan, who does not want his full name used. Yet just before she died Meskoni told a friend that her "mission in life" had been completed by getting her three children out of Iraq; she herself received a U.S. visa in April, her son says, and Hanna's was due in July.

From Hanna's earliest years he had a touch of Ben Franklin or Abe Lincoln about him. When he was 9 he took to reading his schoolbooks by the light of a street lamp outside his home in Mosul. He graduated from high school in 1959 with the third highest marks in the city, earning a scholarship to study petroleum engineering in England. When he returned to Baghdad in 1965, he met his future wife at the Oil Ministry, where she worked as an English translator. Both were Christians, but from rival sects—she was Syriac Catholic, and he was Syriac Orthodox—and her family's social standing was far above his. Her parents' big, comfortable house was always full of intellectuals and writers. Still, she fell for the worldly style Hanna had picked up in England. He could dance. And her father could see that the boy had brains.

Hanna took his wife with him when he returned to England in 1969 to earn his Ph.D. Their son was born there in 1971. An English friend of Meskoni's from those days, Wendy Raybould, fondly recalls the tiny, pale Iraqi's irrepressible nature: "At the christening, there I was, swanning around with this baby, while Emel was tearing around the house, making food, doing the washing up, making sure everyone had what they needed. She was a multitasker par excellence." A year later the couple took their son home to Baghdad, where their first daughter followed in 1974 and a second in 1976. (The family has asked that we not give the children's names.) Those were the family's happiest years, before Saddam took over as president in 1979. Then Hanna began getting bypassed for promotions even though he was one of the best-educated technical advisers at the Oil Ministry. American technical journals published his articles, but he refused to join the ruling Baath Party.