NEW YORK // It starts as all American support groups start – with coffee and doughnuts.
Then come the introductions and a turn for the surreal. “I’m Rikard,” says one attendee, “and I started the Iraq war.”
The 2003 invasion of Iraq may not sound a likely starting point for a musical farce but a new off-Broadway show is turning the intelligence failures and human bungles that led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein into a night of songs and jokes.
The creators of Baghdaddy, which opened on Monday night, say its satire carries a serious message that resonates in a contemporary America of alternative facts and fake news. Always be careful what you believe, is their watchword.
Baghdaddy is based on the true story of Curveball, an Iraqi defector whose fake information about weapons of mass destruction fooled the West and became the basis for the US-led invasion.
“And he lied,” said Marshall Pailet, director, co-writer and composer. “He made the whole thing up, none of it happened. So the question is how could that have happened and how could so many people have dropped the ball along the way and – most interestingly to us – why did they drop the ball?”
The story begins in a modern day support group for disgraced intelligence agents who are trying to understand how they got it so wrong. Then the action switches back to before the war. A defector arrives at a German airport in 1999, claiming to be carrying important secrets about Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programme. He tells his tale in return for money, a car and expensive nights out.
His words quickly take on a life of their own as the intelligence passes from German operatives to the CIA, to the US state department and ultimately to the United Nations as Washington urges its allies to go to war. Along the way, a young analyst makes a fateful mistake, muddling up the German words for credible and reliable. With a simple slip, Curveball’s words take on the weight of truth.
Officers who might have spotted the mistake are too caught up in their own ambition or desire to break out of the daily grind to entertain doubts.
Rather than portraying a global conspiracy theory – manipulated by hidden hands looking for oil, defence contracts or power – Baghdaddy depicts the spies and their masters as all too human. The entire show is a lesson in the dangers of only relying on information that supports a pre-determined position and a meditation on truth, all delivered with jokes and songs layered in exaggerated accents and played for laughs.
Mr Pailet said the story of Curveball naturally lent itself to comedy. “This is a story of devastating global events and the individuals who caused it and the individual motivations that caused it,” he said. “In our research we found ... human motivations and failings were the cause, so that just seemed kind of farcical to us.”
The farce comes to a temporary halt with September 11, 2001. The stage lighting darkens with the change in the show’s tone, and a swirl of dust trapped in twin beams of light illustrates the moment the world is turned upside down.
The jokes and songs continue but are careful to address the characters and their flaws rather than September 11 or Iraq.
The real Curveball, Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al Janabi, eventually admitted in 2011 that his tale was an invention. But though both the German and British intelligence services harboured doubts about his claims, his story was still used by London and Washington as evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as they built their case for an invasion.
In his 2003 state of the union address, US president George W Bush said: “We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs.” That claim was based on Curveball’s detailed descriptions.
Some 14 years after the invasion, the Middle East is still dealing with the fallout and weapons of mass destruction have never been found.
Mr Paillet began working on the show in 2011. Then, he said, “It felt like a period piece, a reflection on the past”.
But six years on? “Today it is just a little too relevant,” he added.
Previews of the show began in New York last month on the day US president Donald Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian airbase.
Mr Paillet wishes the entire US administration could see the show.
“The lesson comes down to truth and facts,” he said. “Even if you believe something and you want it to be true more than anything, even if everyone agrees with you, it doesn’t make it true. That’s why we have the scientific method and we have checks and balances.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
