 Prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to assist troops in identifying key members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and Central Command designed a deck of playing cards featuring photographs – when available – and brief descriptions of 52 of the top-55 individuals the United States government sought to detain during the early war effort. According to Pentagon spokeswoman Megan Fox, only 200 of the so-called Personality Identification Playing Card decks were printed and none distributed as originally planned. Yet the subsequent rise and popularity of “Iraq’s Most Wanted” reproductions and satires targeting the Bush administration and others was remarkable. For the public and media alike, playing cards became not only a popular wartime artifact, but a locus of debate over the ethical status of political actions. Over the summer of 2003, struck as many had been by the symbol of gambling in the context of controversial political decisions, I began to compose a book-length series of poems addressed to the seemingly anonymous figures on the Department of Defense cards, using a private, idiosyncratic language characteristic of intimacy. Conceived as love letters, each poem addresses one of the war criminals in what has come to be known the Deck of Doom. The intent was not to humanize and excuse their crimes, but to stimulate, through play on the ambiguous expression “most wanted,” thought about the psychosocial underpinnings of love and war and the rhetorical strategies that attend them. By early 2004, having completed a first draft of my Most Wanted series,
I decided that a powerful, if not fitting, presentation of the verse
would be in the form of a deck of playing cards. The end-result, Most
Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, features brief but representative
excerpts from the full-length poems.
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