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blue bits. red rocks.
Friday 30 October 2009

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called “the blood dimmed tide” to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes. So the lesson I take away is never to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places. I came to love Iraq’s scrub desert, its date palm groves and marshlands, but most of all its courageous people who despite great personal losses did not lose faith in their country’s possibilities: the imams who prayed despite threats, my Shiite friend Salama Khafaji, who lost her eldest son in a Sunni ambush in the Triangle of Death, yet continues to work for integration. Terrible things happened in Iraq over the last six years, and I go to Afghanistan feeling that we owe it to everyone who has died in Iraq — Iraqi and American — not to forget, not to gloss over, not to think in terms of success and failure, or victory and defeat, but to see as best we can, through a glass darkly. NYTimes.com

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