Baghdad Blues: Sam Greenlee

"If we lose Iraq, we lose the Middle East." These words, which could have been spoken by a Republican member of Congress today, are in fact spoken by a character in Sam Greenlee's 1976 mass-market paperback novel Baghdad Blues. The novel's main character, Dave Burrell, is an African American from Chicago, a trained Arabic speaker, and part of the small enclave of American diplomats stationed in Baghdad during the July 1958 Iraqi revolution that brought Abdel-Karim Qassem to power.

The back cover describes the protagonist like this: "Dave Burrell is a young recruit officer in the U.S. Information Bureau who admires the rebels and secretly supports their views. His white colleagues, champions of the Iraqi government, are too busy drinking martinis and being 'liberal' to care." It is as if "Shaft" has been set down in Paul Bremer's Green Zone.