“Every year we mention the situation in Iraq,” my dad wrote in his Christmas letter of 2004, the year Elliott and I married—and the year my father produced a PowerPoint presentation called “Mass Graves Symphony” about the atrocities in his homeland. “The occupation was bungled,” he wrote. “A civil war loomed. And the final bonds between ethnic and religious groups that once lived alongside each other in peace are now broken….Besides the removal of Saddam, it’s hard to find anything positive to say.”
