History's terrible harvest
History of bloodshed. When America struck into Iraq, there were countless Arabs not given to political correctness who prophesied calamity for America, who looked back on Iraq's violent past and were sure that that terrible history would repeat itself. They knew of the bloodshed that dated to the early years of Islam. They recalled the solitary fate and beheading of the Prophet's grandson, Imam Hussein, on the plains of Karbala, in the year 680, that gave Shiism its iconic hero and its founding myth of persecution. Making their way through history, they recalled what befell the Hashemites--tragic and cultured--on that cruel summer day in 1958. They remembered, too, the macabre display on television, in 1963, of the corpse of the strongman Abdul Karim Qassem.
The hope of this war was the hope of a new beginning. It would be false pride to say that what we have just witnessed in Fallujah does not dent those thoroughly American hopes of reform and new beginnings. There is silence in the Arab world and perhaps no small measure of glee over Fallujah. Those who avert their gaze from Fallujah tell us volumes about themselves and about their world.
advertisement
