Between the Lines of an Iraqi Letter (MUST READ)

Twice in the past week, George W. Bush has been called "Pharaoh" in missives from the Middle East. The word was uttered by the voice on an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera, which may or may not have been that of Osama bin Laden, and it also appeared in the recent letter from Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, to Kofi Annan accepting the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq. "Go thou to Pharaoh," Mr. Sabri's letter begins, quoting from the Koran, "for he has indeed transgressed all bounds. But speak to him mildly; perchance he may take warning or fear." These are the words Allah speaks to Moses and his brother Aaron in the sura, or section, called Ta-Ha. Unlike Mr. Sabri, Allah did not mean these words ironically.

Between the Lines of an Iraqi Letter By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

wice in the past week, George W. Bush has been called "Pharaoh" in missives from the Middle East. The word was uttered by the voice on an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera, which may or may not have been that of Osama bin Laden, and it also appeared in the recent letter from Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, to Kofi Annan accepting the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq. "Go thou to Pharaoh," Mr. Sabri's letter begins, quoting from the Koran, "for he has indeed transgressed all bounds. But speak to him mildly; perchance he may take warning or fear." These are the words Allah speaks to Moses and his brother Aaron in the sura, or section, called Ta-Ha. Unlike Mr. Sabri, Allah did not mean these words ironically.

To American ears, the allusion to Pharaoh sounds very strange, and not only because it implies that Mr. Bush is a tyrant and America a tyranny, something stated openly a little later in Mr. Sabri's letter. In the Koran, as in the Bible, the Pharaoh is the very image of organized evil. No matter what you may think of Mr. Bush and his policies, he is obviously no Pharaoh. Nor is there anything Pharaonic about America, however bureaucratic its government may be.

But what sounds oddest about this reference is the geographical inversion required to call Mr. Bush "Pharaoh." To Americans, an allusion to Pharaoh is by definition an allusion to the ancient Middle East, and specifically to Egypt. But to Mr. bin Laden, if that was indeed his voice on the tape, and to Mr. Sabri and his employer, invoking Pharaoh's name is a moral allusion, unbound by any regional associations. To them, Pharaoh lives still, not as a tyrant of flesh and blood but as an apotheosis of secular evil. To us, of course, it seems far more natural to think of Saddam Hussein as Pharaoh, though he lacks the splendor and dignity — the godlike bearing — required for the job.

The quotation from the Koran sets the tone for the strange rhetoric of the Iraqi letter, which is no less strange if you discount, as one must, the muddled English translation from the Arabic. There is usually nothing drier than the language of diplomacy, a place where living tongues go to die. Its diction has all the colors of a charcoal-gray suit. Unlike the Iraqi letter, diplomatic correspondence is not usually populated by cawing crows and raging bulls nor with "those who bite on their fingers."

The text of the Iraqi foreign minister's letter will remind many people of the intemperate language that used to come out of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the text borrows as richly from that old Communist vocabulary as it does from the lexicon of the Koran and the sanitized language of United Nations resolutions. But the Iraqi letter will also remind many readers that President Bush and Saddam Hussein are both drawing from the same well of outrage, with biblical — or koranic if you like — overtones. "Axis of evil" has a different ring to American ears than "gang of evil," but it's really only a difference in decorum — "gang" coming to us directly from the streets and "axis" coming right out of a valorous chapter in American history.

It's hardly surprising that in the approach to war America and Iraq should echo each other or that their leaders, however different their political foundations may be, should be trying to shape the most persuasive formulation of their positions. The Iraqi letter reaches for the language of moral suasion, trying to speak in apothegms, as well as in the logic of international law, but every rhetoric it touches turns as hollow as the case it is making. It talks about stabbing the truth "with the dagger of evil." It argues that "he who remains silent in the defense of truth is a dumb devil." And though a reader ends up feeling that he is reading through a glass, darkly, pondering a text where the subtlest implications have been buried by a garbled rendering into English, the real purport of the letter is perfectly clear. It is a howl of temporary surrender, a plea of continuing defiance.

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