National Democratic Party

He will go on to build one of the country's most successful manufacturing enterprises, cement and other materials, the literal stuff that nations are constructed from.

But he is also a political reformer, one of the founders of the National Democratic Party, a movement committed to constitutional government, secular civic life, and a vision of Iraq that is modern, pluralistic, and self-determining.

Neither beholden to old feudal hierarchies nor content to be a satellite of foreign interests.

He will, in the years ahead, serve as finance minister.

Iraq's political situation has, by this point, grown considerably more fraught than it was in the relatively hopeful years of her early childhood.

The Ba'athist government now in power is consolidating control in ways that will, within a few more years, harden into the long dictatorship that comes to define the country's later 20th-century history.

Her father's reformist political tradition, the National Democratic Party, the constitutional liberalism he had spent his career championing, finds itself increasingly out of step with and vulnerable to the direction the country is taking.

The Baghdad of ziggurat excursions and cosmopolitan convent schools and lively political dinner table argument, the Baghdad that shaped the earliest layers of Zaha's imagination, is not going to remain accessible to her in the same way it had been.