History's terrible harvest
We shouldn't have been surprised that the desecration of the dead occurred in the town of Fallujah. The practice has a long and searing history in Iraq. There was that day in the terrible summer of 1958, on July 14, when the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown, and the boy-king, Faisal II, was murdered along with his entire family. Two hated men of the Hashemite regime, the crown prince and a politician by the name of Nuri Pasha al-Said, were to suffer the fury of the mob: Their corpses were dragged through the streets, strung up, torn, and then burned. Long before Mogadishu, Somalia, there had been moments of such shame in the history of modern Iraq. Those corpses hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates, those frenzied mobs beating the dead with their shoes, that 10-year-old partaking of it all, with such cruel pride: Along with the Iraqis, we have now stared into the abyss.
Our statistics--very American and very precise--recount our progress in Iraq: the millions of vaccinations, the schools refurbished, the new currency introduced in record time, the numbers of policemen trained. All those statistics, so relentlessly optimistic, must now do battle with those terrible images of desecration. We may choose to say, as we must, that we will not let the howling mob of Fallujah dictate our policies, that we won't cut and run. But we must reckon with the furies of Iraq. And the question shall be starkly put: Can our earnestness survive on the harsh soil of that hard land? Can any meaningful bonds be forged between Iraq and its American liberators? We can kill the men who did the grim work of mutilation and thrilled to it all. But what are we to make of, and do with, the shopkeepers and the prayer leaders and that man on the street proclaiming Fallujah, with pride, as the "cemetery of the Americans"? It would be the American thing to pause and say that Iraqis will have to take stock of their own history and its terrible harvest. But the truth is darker than that piece of westernism. There shall be no remorse in that "Sunni triangle" consumed by its rage. It will not matter to the mob that Islam is severe in its admonition against violating the dead. Such scruples have no place in the moral calculus of that pitiless crowd.
The killers and those who winked at them know the "rules of engagement" with the American forces. They strike in the knowledge that the rules and scruples of liberalism shall hold, confident that there will be no mass internment, no collective reprisals. The moral fortitude of our armed forces is indeed remarkable. In the aftermath of the cruelty in Fallujah, a high officer in the Marine Corps, a former student of mine now on duty in Iraq, in the heart of the Sunni triangle, sent me an E-mail moving for its refusal to succumb to anger. With a soldier's restraint and precision, he wrote, "The Iraqis I met--I like. They want the same stuff all of us do in the States . . ." The Iraqis know that no Hama shall be unleashed on them. (The reference is to the Syrian town that rebelled against the regime of Hafez Assad in 1982 and was laid waste to by the regime.) We have rolled history's dice in Iraq. Kurdistan aside, we interposed American power between the Sunnis and Shiites. Had it not been for our war, those pitiless towns of Tikrit and Fallujah and Ramadi would still have the run of a big country to terrorize and plunder at will. Their war against us is, by their lights, a righteous campaign to retrieve a lost dominion.
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.
This story appears in the April 12, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.