Doom in Baghdad.

• Author: Landau, Saul

A friend told me I was crazy to fly this September 11. "Blame Jim Abourezk," I said.

Abourezk had asked me to accompany him and Representative Nick Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia, on a humanitarian mission to Iraq. Abourezk, the seventy-one-year-old former South Dakota Democratic Senator (1973-79), dropped out of his Sioux Falls law practice for a week "to do what I can to try to stop the war," he told me.

Neither Abourezk nor Rahall was sure that the Iraqis would listen to political logic.

"What lessons has Saddam learned from the Gulf War?" I asked Abourezk.

"We'll see, but I'm not optimistic," he said. "We have to talk Iraqi officials into doing something they don't want to do: Readmit the U.N. weapons inspectors Clinton ordered to leave in 1998. Otherwise, Bush'll bomb the shit out of the Iraqis."

We met up in Amsterdam en route to Iraq, and we laughed about his first experience as an emissary in a collision-course situation. In 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM) had claimed to have taken hostages on the Wounded Knee Reservation, and AIM leaders asked for Abourezk to negotiate with them.

"South Dakota is my state," Abourezk said back then, "and I chair the Indian Affairs Subcommittee, so I'll be there." Along with South Dakota's senior Senator, George McGovern, Abourezk flew in an Air Force helicopter to Pine Ridge, where the FBI agent in charge met them. "It was not that far from the little village of Wood on the Sioux reservation where my father, a Lebanese peddler, had opened a general store," Abourezk recalls. He conferred with AIM leader Russell Means and advised him to give it up before someone got hurt. Means agreed to do so on the condition that the government stipulate what the charges would be, but the Nixon Administration would not oblige, and so the standoff lasted seventy more days. Later, a federal prosecutor called Abourezk to testify against AIM. "I told him what I had told the FBI, that the Indians had a just cause, and he said, `Forget it, we don't need your testimony.'"

Abourezk got into more controversy after his first trip to the Middle East in 1973, when he criticized U.S.-Israel policy and defended Palestinian rights. "People I thought were friends became instant enemies," he says. "Guys who worked on my campaign stopped speaking to me. Worse, they started spreading rumors about me being anti-Semitic. Wolf Blitzer [who then wrote articles for a journal published by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] said vicious stuff about me `selling out to the Arabs,' because I spoke about Israel withdrawing to the pre-1967 borders in exchange for the Arab governments signing a peace agreement with Israel, which they told me they would do."

In 1980, Abourezk founded the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It became the first organization to bring together Arab Americans from all regions of the country, not only to deal with grievances, but to stand up for...