The lions' struggles in the outside world—and the book's somewhat blunt-instrument ending—can easily be interpreted as critical of American intervention. Unlike traditional fables, however, Pride of Baghdad doesn't offer a simple moral. In fact, Vaughan's written something of a dialectic, offering compelling and competing arguments from its many characters—lions, tortoises, bears, monkeys. A chilling scene at the book's midpoint illustrates Vaughan's complicated take. In search of prey, Safa and Noor stumble into one of Saddam's grand palaces, where they find a starving, dying lion chained to a wall. Safa can't believe the humans who cared for them so long—who kept the lions, in effect, middle-class and comfortable—could have been responsible for such an atrocity: "They may have been our captors, but they weren't torturers." But Noor disagrees: "Those who would hold us captive are always tyrants. If we had remained as we were, we would have ended up hanging from a leash just like this poor bastard."