Regrets Only?

1. Dokan, Iraq They were well into their dinner when the talk turned to the most troubling question of all. The guests, brought here to discuss plans for the American University of Iraq, had been passing around platters of shabbout, an oily and bony fish, in the dining room of a villa owned by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, when the question came up. The six Iraqis and one Lebanese-American had gathered in this lakeside guesthouse in the mountains of Kurdistan, far from the furies of Baghdad and Basra. No one had actually posed the question; it crept up on its own. Among Iraqi exiles, particularly those who had been instrumental in persuading the Americans to invade, it was still something of a taboo.

“Leave Saddam in power?” asked Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, holding court in the middle. “So that he would be free to continue killing, free to invade his neighbors, so that he would be free to — I am sorry — develop nuclear weapons?” He shook his head. “No.”