A reader writes:
Wow, I remember the Liberace of Baghdad — from the Hamra Hotel in the winter/spring of 2004.
You’re right about watching society crumble before your eyes. It’s very difficult for people to understand but, between orgies of mass slaughter, you kind of knew where you stood in Saddam’s Iraq. This isn’t my speculation; this is what Iraqis have told me. That order was imposed by terror. But all the invasion did was destroy the order — it didn’t eliminate the terror. The insurgency, the militias and the criminal gangs terrify Iraqis more than Saddam did.
One of the drivers I work with has moved his family out of Baghdad because his old neighborhood is no longer safe. But they’re Shiites, and they must travel between Baghdad and their new home on a road where they risk being stopped and murdered by Sunni insurgents. I know a translator, a Christian, who was terrified his neighbors would find out he was working for western reporters. He had lied about what kind of work he was doing, and to avoid being caught out he slowly withdrew until he wasn’t talking to his neighbors at all.
I didn’t have a single moment of clarity about Iraq. The most horrible thing I’ve seen here was the charred bodies of those Blackwater contractors strung up at the bridge. I was at the scene by happenstance. But terrible things happen in war, and the barbarism of the enemy is no reason to stop fighting. I was reacting more to the realization that we’d never be able to understand what motivates Iraqis, and they’d never be able to understand what motivates us. That Christian translator and I were talking politics in the winter of 2004 and he asked, "How can we be asked to fight for democracy when we don’t know what that is?"
The gulf is just too wide. We tried to bridge it with recklessness instead of respect, and with arrogance instead of courage.
The Dish 