Bedlam by the Euphrates

A reader sends a link to a subscribers-only article in the National
Journal, "Iraq -- Grief and Rage" by Tish Durkin. It's an account
of what will never make the headlines: the torture and mutilation of five
Shi'ite truck drivers by Sunni "insurgents", if that is the term.

The photos defy examination, let alone description: eight close-up, color
images of death, as it came on June 6 to five Iraqi men. Death came after the
men had been tortured, but before their bodies were mutilated and left in a
city garbage dump. ... Some time after that, they were retrieved by the men's
families, who took the photos for a very specific reason. "We have sent
the CDs of these pictures to all the Shiite mosques, and to the Mahdi
Army," said Sheik Faisal al-Janany a few days after the bodies were
retrieved from the morgue, "so that they can see what the people of Sunni
are doing to the people of Shia."

The pictures, even by the standard of "freedom fighter"
productions, were not pretty.

In one of the photos, Faisal's 29-year-old son, Hamad, has a head that is
so badly crushed that it resembles a smashed eggplant; skin that has been
burned a marbled brown; and a mouth that appears to be full of ash, but almost
empty of teeth. In another photo, Faisal's 27-year-old nephew, Khalad, has
several thick black stripes down his back. Perhaps, an observer speculated, he
was beaten with a red-hot whip; perhaps he had been pressed into a red-hot
metal chair. In some of the other photos, the victims are missing one forearm.

And so on. The truck drivers had just made a delivery of furniture to the
Iraqi Army when their vehicles were blocked at the Al Forat bridge in Falluja
and a crowd of shopkeepers and cigarette vendors -- armed of course, as all
cigarette vendors are -- pulled them from their vehicles. One of the Shi'ites, a
12 year old boy named Mohammed, escaped and ignoring the blows and injuries,
reached an American checkpoint, where he was treated. The uncomprehending medic
turned him over the an Iraqi policeman who promptly returned him to an insurgent
in the person of imam Abdullah al-Janaby, the preacher at the Sa'ad Aby Ibn
Waqas mosque, who directed other boys of about the same age to beat him prior to
worse. He made his escape yet again and reached the home of a friend who
spirited him away to Baghdad.

The National Journal writer concludes that incidents like these are tipping
Iraq into civil war. None of the Shi'ites she spoke to believed the truck
drivers were killed because of any connection to America; they believe they were
targeted because they were Shi'ites. One of the other truck drivers survived by
convincing his captors that he was Sunni. He had an identity card, issued by the
old Saddam regime which misspelled his name in the Sunni way.

When the blindfold was removed, he saw the Asian-featured faces of his
captors and in his mind registered them initially as Japanese. Instantly
realizing that that could not be, he figured that they must be from Central
Asia, perhaps Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, or Chechnya. There was also, he
recalls, someone who looked and spoke like an Egyptian. ... He told them that
he lived in the heavily Sunni, pro-Saddam city of Yousefia, south of Baghdad.
He told them that he had agreed to join a convoy ... strictly because he
needed the work, and that he had in his truck a dangling portrait of the Imam
Ali only because he was afraid that the Shiites would kill him if he didn't.

In an ironic way, American troops are probably the sole guarantors of
Falluja's survival. Many outraged Shi'ites want the place leveled, plowed and
then salted. In a land filled with conspiracy theories surely the most bizzarre
is the belief that the Americans are in league with Al Qaeda to kill off the
Shi'ites simply because they have not incinerated Fallujah. "'If the
Americans don't kill the terrorists,'" Abu Yas declared, "'we will
think, 100 percent, that the Americans have a relationship with Al Qaeda.'"
The theory that the United States could leave the Islamic world alone may be as
wishful as the proposition that you can leave a bomb to tick in peace.

To hear Shiites tell it, Falluja is the land of the fatally false facade:
The mosques are prisons, the holy men are criminal warriors, the police and
the courts are lackeys of the resistance, and the merchants are double agents;
at the sight of any suspicious outsider in their shop or restaurant, they dial
instantly to alert the mujahedeen. "When I went into the mosque,"
Sheik Faisal tells me, "I saw it was not really a mosque for praying.
There were many rooms inside of the mosque for people being beaten."

The road may be long and hard, but the underlying dysfunction which gave rise
to September 11 -- and the mutilation of the five Shi'ite truck drivers  --
among many similar incidents, must be addressed in some way unless we can leave
the planet.

---

There are some who believe we can put a lid on situations like these by
imposing sanctions. The more extreme might argue that a naval blockade or no-fly
zone will alter the situation on the ground. After all, that was policy for a
decade. Still others think that "diplomacy" or United Nations
legitimacy would have made a crucial difference. The more thoughtful have
suggested that if the United States had sent 50,000, 100,000 more occupying
troops or if these included a few Frenchmen the problems might have been
averted. But how do you blockade the human heart? How do you "avert"
problems 100 generations old?

Some have seriously suggested that if America pulled into a tight perimeter
around its borders such men could not reach inward to hurt children; could not
"IED" American travelers en route to Thailand or Germany; could not
"mortar" the homeland with aircraft attacks like they mortar some
military bases or the northern towns of Israel; could not infiltrate
"sleepers" into the 8 million American Muslims the way they have
infiltrated the Green Zone. Could not act abroad as they act at home. These
solutions have been advocated by men of goodwill, experience and intelligence,
but will they work?

The neoconservative assumption that Middle Eastern societies were
transformable has been described as the product of excessive hope when it is
really the counsel of despair. It is the remainder which 'however improbable, is
all that is left after all the impossibles have been eliminated'. The fact that
America, without resorting to mass murder, has kept such a fractious country
intact, that many Iraqis daily risk their lives in the effort to beat back this
darkness, is testimony to a quality of work which deserves better than the scorn
that has been heaped upon it.

In a few weeks many social liberals will feel impelled to vote as Mahatir
Mohammed suggests, for entirely different reasons but for the same man
nonetheless. Some conservatives have already accepted the idea that the only
proper reaction to the "bloody borders of Islam" is to recoil as
Ronald Reagan did once upon a time in Beirut, hoping nothing more will follow.
But there is nowhere left to run and having learned so much about the problem,
nothing really before us but our trepidation.