Sunday, June 3, 2007
Edward Wong has been covering Iraq for several years. He offers us a simple empirical, cultural fact about the region we mistakenly occupied with insufficient force to prevail. What we have unwittingly unleashed in Iraq is completely beyond our control. It's their country; it's their civil war; they've waited centuries to wage it. We think we are powerful enough to control it now?
This is Iraq:
The word is 'sahel,' and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.
It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.
Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.
"Other Arabs say, 'You are the country of sahel,'" Razzaq said. "It has always been that way in Iraq."
But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it. Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.
It will have to get worse, much worse, before it can get better. No one can surely find any solace in that fact. The innocent lives that will be shed are hard to fathom. But this is the choice. We can either stay in the middle of such a conflict and try to absorb its ineluctable unfolding with the bodies of young Americans. Or we can leave and redeploy over the horizon. Forget what we wish were true. This is what is in front of our noses.
moreMore from the NYT
article:
For the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraqis, the unalloyed hostility of the Sunni Arabs only reinforces a centuries-old sense of victimhood. So the Shiite militias grow, stoking vengeance. Through force of arms, and backed by the Americans and Iran, the religious Shiites intend to dominate the country entirely, taking what they believe was stripped from them when their revered leader Hussein was murdered in the desert of seventh-century Mesopotamia.
It was at the site of that ancient bloodletting, Karbala, that I twice witnessed the intense Shiite ache for righteousness and triumph. In early 2004, thousands of young fighters in the Mahdi Army, the militia of the nationalist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, fought and died in a fevered uprising against the Americans. Last March, the same zealotry showed in a different way, as millions of Shiite pilgrims marched to Karbala’s shrines to commemorate the death of Hussein. They went despite relentless attacks by Sunni Arab suicide bombers. To them, it was all part of the unending war.
“No country in the world is fighting such terrorism,” said Adel Abdul Mehdi, an Iraqi vice president and leader in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a powerful Shiite party, on the day he made his pilgrimage. “Every time we give more martyrs, we are more determined. This is a big battle, there is no such battle in the world.”
The Shiites have waited centuries for their moment on the throne, and the war is something they are willing to tolerate as the price for taking power, said the Iraqi leader who had invited me to dinner in the Green Zone. “The Shia say this is not exceptional for them, this is normal,” he said.
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