‘Sahel’
03 June 2007 4:00 am by Taylor Marsh
Edward Wong’s article leaves you so empty, so hopeless, so impossibly exhausted
and emotionally drained it’s hard to fathom we’re in Iraq with no end in sight,
unless Mr. Bush comes to his senses, which he won’t, or the Republicans revolt. It is the story of
futility, our own.
The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone
by dragging his corpse through the streets.The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have
seen in three and a half years of covering the war.(snip)
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.President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement
here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict
and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have
grown weary. But they are not the ones at the country’s helm; many are
among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists
to take control of their homeland.“We’ve changed nothing,” said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni
Arab dentist turned hard-line politician who has three bullets lodged in his
torso from a recent assassination attempt. “It’s dark. There will
be more blood.” … ..
The Iraqis are going to murder each other the moment we leave, no matter when
that point comes. There is nothing we can do about it. I wish this weren’t so,
but it is. All the troops we’ve got won’t stop it, unless we’re going to transport
part of Iraq into a Little America. You know, like the embassy we’re building,
or the bases, which will only offer up targets for terrorism.
That’s why when I hear arguments comparing the importance of staying in Iraq
to the U.S. presence in Korea I feel I’ve entered some war theater where the
war movie I’m watching suddenly turns to horror.Leslie
Gelb speaks for me.
“It’s not that Iraq isn’t vital,” said Leslie Gelb,
the former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, and one of the many
experts organized by groups opposing Mr. Bush’s Iraq strategy to shoot
back in the analogy war. “It’s just that Korea bears no resemblance
to Iraq. There’s no strategy that can create victory.”
Sahel. Learning that word makes it clear how right Gelb is, if it
hadn’t dawned on you before. But when the ramifications sink in and the depths
to which the incomprehension of Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy crystallize, it actually
becomes frightening that the President of the United States doesn’t get on any
level what is going on where we have 150,000 troops and counting in the kill
zone of a population of people that could care less how broad the carnage gets,
because in the end that is the goal they’re striving to meet.
What fresh hell lies head? That question has been answered.
