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.
(Photo: A wounded Iraqi girl inspects, 03 June 2007 the rubble at the site, where she was injured in a car bomb which tore, 22 May 2007 through a market in the flashpoint Baghdad district of Amil. Tens of Iraqis were killed and wounded in the blast, the vast majority of which were women and children. By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)
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