cc
for your patience. >> Charles Cohen: Thank you
of the crowd, we're diverting other folks to an overflow room,
and we want to make sure that they're settled.
I'm Charles Cohen, professor of history and religious studies
and director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the
Abrahamic Religions at UW-Madison.
The institute runs conversations
scholarship about Judaism, on, and events dealing with
It's my feeling that at this Christianity and Islam.
cooperation is no longer an poption, it's mandatory.h
We're delighted to welcome
back to the UW campus. Anthony Shadid
Lubar Institute and the Center This is a joint event of the
advisory board I'm proud to serve under Steve Ward, whom I
will be introducing momentarily.
over a year ago when Steve and I The genesis of this event came
our two units to collaborate and were thinking that we would like
collaboration might be. We talked about a conference,
a number of things, I think I threw out the name of John
Allen, the reporter on the
wanted something to do with Catholic religion.ecause we
And somehow, I don't remember which one of us, maybe it was
both of us, said well how about Anthony Shadid.
And that was an obviously good idea.
And then Steve brought that into effect.
I'd like to thank Anthony for coming, and we're rolling out a
big Wisconsin welcome for him which means six to eight inches
of snow.
But he's a Badger, [LAUGHTER]
Indeed it wouldn't be December so he knows this.
Putting on an event like this always requires a great deal of
work. I want to thank the people
on my staff, most particularly
Sari Judge, Kwho have worked on this.,
And then particularly Wendy Swanberg of the Center for
Journalism Ethics who has had the central part in up running
this event and doing all the
of your coming here so possible. nasty details that make the ease
funders, the Lubars who have I also want to mention the
gift to the institute, to the Center for Journalism Ethics,
we have enjoyed additional
University of Wisconsin Lectures funding support from the
generous for this event, Committee which has been very
and Mass Communications. and the School of Journalism
has been provided by the Additional logistical support
Before we go any farther, I'll Middle East Studies Program.
electronic devices except for those that are necessary to keep
bodily functions continuing.
And it's my pleasure then to introduce my colleague,
Steven Ward.
Steven Ward: Thank you, everyone.]
It's my enjoyable task to introduce Anthony to you.
Thank you Professor Cohen and welcome to what I hope will be
the first fall ethics lecture,
and again in the future. and we'll make this happen again
without a battle for hearts and Nominds at home and abroad.rs
And one can say war and ideology
In a conflict zone, a perfect storm of obstacles can limit
reporting as the guns do battle and the dead are buried.
Reporters struggle with the chaos, the conflicting claims,
and the limits of their own perspective.
I can think of no one better to speak about reporting the war
in Iraq than Anthony Shadid.
foreign reporters, and he lives Hat the intersection of war,g
religion and journalism.
of the title of his talk: "The Truths We Tell."e
I suspect he wants to talk
become to be called truths and about those narratives, how they
Anthony Shadid is a foreign correspondent and deputy bureau
chief of the New York Times in Baghdad and Beirut.
Until December 2009 he was the
Washington Post. Baghdad bureau chief of the
reported for most countries in And over a 15-year career he has
Born in Oklahoma City, the Middle East and beyond.
1990 with degrees in journalism he grand political science,n in
and he studied Arabic.
award-winning books, and he has won numerous journalism awards
including not one,
Pulitzer Prizes, both for his coverage and reporting on Iraq.
The first Pulitzer Prize in 2004
invasion and occupation of Iraq. was for his reporting of the US
Prize for coverage of Iraq as In the US began to withdraw.tzer
In awarding his second Pulitzer Prize, go and read them, they're
beautiful as well as good works of journalism, the judges
recognized "His rich, beautifully written series
on Iraq as the United States
leaders struggle to deal with depthe legacy of war, andnd
to shape the nation's future."
come with great risk. In 2002, Anthony was shot in the
back while covering fighting in the west bank city of Ramallah.
Not long afterward, I don't know
Anthony, the UW School of whetJournalism and Massr it,
Communication awarded him the Ralph Nafziger Award which
recognizes young alumni.
Distinguished Alumni Award for And in 2005 he received the
Association. the Wisconsin Alumni
happy, I was happy, very happy As a former war reporter, I'm
this lecture. tIn an era of skepticism aboutut
journalists, it is important
have opportunities to discuss public affairs with journalists
of the dedication and integrity of Anthony Shadid.
When I sent Anthony a proposed
I jammed it with as many things itiI could put on it.it,
Class visits, student lunches,
whatever, and a talk to boot. He graciously and immediately
said, I'll do it all, no problem, Steve.
That was way too easy.
generosity and to your family for coming all this way to be
with us tonight.
for questions and I'm looking Aforward to a very simulatingm
time with you tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Anthony Shadid: Well, I want
very gracious introduction. I want to thank the Lubar
Institute, the Center for Journalism Ethics, of course the
J School. It's an unbelievable pleasure
for me to get to come back to Wisconsin.
I tell you day before, we got here this morning and we were
putting a lot of technology together which I had to say I'm
not all sophisticated at, so
And of course I've got a cold wand I'm probably going to lose
my voice halfway through the
out better than that. leAs Steven mentioned, I am anks
alumni of the university here,
It's always a pleasure for me to something I'm very proud of.
I may have grown up in Oklahoma, come back to Wisconsin.
than not I think Wisconsin is but iactually home to me. ways
And it struck me as we were driving to the hotel going down
State Street, it brought back all the memories of being
a young reporter
I was all bundled up. at thI was riding my bike
down State Street.
editions of the Badger Herald and the Daily I wante Cardinal. those first
I was a campus editor at the
I had to make sure that we time.
Here's an apology to current and weren't scooped.
past Badger Herald staffers,
but I really hated that newspaper.
I'm very sorry. [LAUGHTER]
I have to say, and I say
editor today who is a pleasant that after meeting the managing
journalist. So don't take it too personally.
I have to say, I credit Wisconsin with two things.
One was critical thinking.
the university has always taken pride, and it's something Ig
certainly take pride in my
And I don't think anything has education here.
career since then. proven more important in my
you're told, to be suspicious, That ability to question what
they're portrayed. to never accept things as
I learned it at the Cardinal. IAnd I learned it with friendsm.
whom I spent way too many hours talking high politics and the
very lowest gossip
The other thing I credit at the Black Bear Lounge.
should say blame here, Wisconsin for, and I probably
to the Green Bay Packers. is a ver[LAUGHTER]diction
I could easily have written another book if I had channeled
all the time I spent reading the
website, the Green Bay Press Sentinel
It's sick. Gazette every morning.
my nine-year-old daughter and Nomy seven-month-old son,
to the frozen tundra
It's just pitiful. of Lambeau Field on Sunday.
[APPLAUSE] It really is.
earliest days I managed to hear Packers games on my satellite
phone.
A bunch of dollars a minute Now theI have to say.cheap.
And in a few months my alarm
for what amounted to what I think was a $20,000 phone bill.d
He came to me.
Then I asked a little more Outrageous, I told him.
computer the satellite phone was sheepishly, can they tell which
To my relief they couldn't. That of course is another rule
every journalist probably should
the truth on your expenses, but upthat's an entirely differentl
story.
I just got back from Baghdad, on a more serious note,
I just got back from Baghdad a
to talk to my daughter, Laila, few weeks ago, and I was trying
the most cursory of ways of what who's here tonight with us, in
122 people had died in just two incidents when I was there.
One was a church attack that
53 people were killed in a people may have heard about.
neighborhood of Karrada. church in the Baghdad
string of bombings across the city that told us, contrary to
popular perception, that the war
It made no sense, in Irwhat I told her.ver.
And she didn't really understand.
In the end what I tried to
so many people died. convey to her were numbers,
other than grounds for debate? But what are numbers really,
And if I learned one thing In the end it's about stories.
foreign correspondent, it's that I think in 15 years of being a
And that brings me to the topic that I wanted to talk to you all
today, Baghdad, a place that
any other place I the past eight years.han
And what I'm going to try to do is tell a story that spans the
conflict in Iraq from shortly after the invasion in 2003 until
this very day, a time when, like
the war is over. I said, people mistakenly think
consequences, that phrase that I It's a story of unintended
Iraq more than any other. thIt's a story that I think isin
crucial, too, if we're to understand what wars like this
represent, wars like this mean. Now the story I want to talk
about tonight began in a funeral
condolences eight years ago this tent that was set up for
I remember the recitation of the March.
scratchy cassette, and I was Koran was playing from a
bitter Arabic coffee. thereI remember an Americanping
helicopter was rumbling overhead, and the men around me
hailed from different tribes in this lush town along the Tigris
River called Thuluyah.
scene of Thuluyah. And on the screen here is a
pay their respects for a beefy All these people had arrived to
black hair and a face that was 15-year-old with a mop of curly
He was one of three people still rounded by adolescence.
in an American raid that was killed a day before in June 2003
I remember the words of one of called Peninsula Strike.
He was a soft spoken judge. tHe called the boy's death,
in this American operation
The future is going to be very in Peninsula Strike, an omen.
We're seeing each day become dark, he warned me then.
Now for the judge and dozens of these other mourners and tribal
leaders who were gathered on
can tell you it was very hot this sweltering afternoon, and I
simply a tragedy. tTo the rest of Iraq, it wass
little more than a statistic. By that I mean it was incidental
in the killing fields the country would soon become.
The raid itself was a footnote
like I said, has dragged on for to a more than seven years.that,
But I think the best journalism is sometimes about footnotes.
When we write small to say something big.
And in time I'd learned that
motion an epic chain of events this boy's death would set into
set foot in the town, and it that began once the US military
on its forlorn outskirts long stiafter they've departed.sert
The next event in that chain had
28-year-old who served as an to do with a tall husky
that raid. informer for the Americans on
the mourners that day blamed him This guy's name was Sabah and
everyone to these condolences in for the deaths that had brought
I'm trying to do this-- I remember children calling this
man Sabah, the "masked man."
given the informer who had warn Ia burlap bag over his headd
during the raid as he ambled
suspected insurgents to the throughAmerican troops.ntified
I remember the children's chants
tent. "Masked man," they shouted,
"Your face
Inside the tent no one would is the face of the devil!"
though everyone knew who he was. dare say this guy's name even
consequences. TOf course he'll be killed,
one man whispered to me,
They'll rip him to pieces, but not yet.
Now let me tell you a little bit another predicted.
Like I said, it was perched on a about this town of Thuluyah.
it's one of the prettier bend in the Tigris River, and
It escaped the ravages of the loAmerican invasion that Aprilq.
two months before.
of Baghdad and beyond the route Ithat the US military took toh
occupy Baghdad. Although its men had filled the
ranks of Saddam Hussein's Baath party, army and intelligence as
well, the town was too small to make most maps.
I never did see it on one,
Within weeks though, it would bear the consequences of
the invasion's very confusing aftermath.
11 days after Saddam Hussein
attacks occurred at the edge of fethe town along an irrigationnt
canal that was soon nicknamed The Valley of Death.
More attacks followed.
Saddam had fallen, in response, Anthe US military devised theer
operation I mentioned earlier,
It would represent the first Peninsula Strike.
that would only grow more attempt to intense. insurgency
These American soldiers arrived after midnight on this June
night.
barreled down these dirt roads Humvees and troop transports
There were F-16s, A-10s, AC-130 pastwar planes.ves.
All of them were heard but not
Soldiers hurried from camouflage seen.
Tigris, and they went past boats on the banks of the
purple flowers. The soldiers shouted in English.
The residents of Thuluyah shook their head in frightened
incomprehension.
one inhabitant told me. TMany of them raised a whiteg,
handkerchief in a universal sign
Many of them were blindfolded, of surrender.
forced to lie on their stomachs. bound with plastic cuffs and
helpless as he listened to his One of them told me he was
nearby. Next to him was his cousin,
a man named Saad -- who's a short and balding guy.
From somewhere near-- Oh, pardon me, he said,
"What do you do?" a translator
"I'm a taxi driver," he replied. barked at him, this Saad --.
this guy heard another voice. The Arabic was spoken in the
town's dialect. It was familiar, that of a
neighbor, someone who lived a few houses away.
"Oh, you're a taxi driver?" the voice said sarcastically
to Ali. And the voice came from this
informer, Sabah.
Those not blindfolded noticed Ohis yellow sandals and his.
mutilated right thumb.
joint in an accident. "That's Sabah! That's Sabah!"
one resident remembered shouting.
When it was over, more than two dozen homes had been raided and
400 people were arrested. Three men were dead including
the 15-year-old boy I mentioned earlier, killed by two shots
that ripped through his abdomen.
but they left behind a myriad Tof grievances in the town.
And by the time I got there,
most of all it was vengeance. No one could do anything about
the soldiers, but they could do something about this informer
named Sabah.
days after Saddam's fall Now it's pretty common these
authority. to see a resurgence of tribal
which had come to fill the It was a brutal frontier justice
The boy was a member of the Aani lawless void back in 2003.
Jabbouri, another tribe. tribe, and the informer was a
biggest and justice would have That tribe was the town's
And powered by Saddam's fall, the tribal leaders, men like
this man, decided to met out
Either Sabah's family would kill their notion of it.
would kill the family, all of them, every single one of them.
The informer's father appealed. At first he denied his son
had worked with the Americans.
he needed permission from the ThenAmericans before he didthat
anything. His pleas were met with anger
and the informer's brother told me that the family soon felt
besieged. Here is how he put it to me.
"We were one house alone
had lined up against us." As this was going on only one
man spoke up against the idea of the father having to kill
his son.
and I want you to remember His name was Mullah Nadhim,
He was the son and grandson of a this name.
Oops, I'm trying to get you pra picture of Mullah Nadhim.lf.
It's not going to work. Sorry.
Oh, that's right.
Here it is. He was the son and grandson,
like I said, of a preacher
And as a religious man he was sympathetic to the pleas of the
informer's brother and father.
the preacher said. No one had proven Sabah's guilt,
the tribal leaders were trying Even worse, he suspected some of
collaboration with the Americans to cover up their own
He told me that he agreed to by making Sabah a scapegoat.
but as he put it to me meet Sabah the next day,
"The -- was faster than I was." The tribal leaders had decided
they would wait no longer and the next morning, two hours
before the call to prayer,
Sabah behind the house nestled Sabah's brother and father led
trees, vineyards and groves of in orchards of fig and almond
His brother said that he told Sabah not to blame them, that it
wasn't their fault. Sabah never resisted.
And five shots later
When I met the father a few weeks later he told me words
that I still haven't forgotten
I don't think I ever could. "Even the prophet Abraham
didn't have to kill his son," he told me.
His eyes glistened, there was no other choice.
A curse, the preacher I told you
And he denounced it three days about, called it.
of Thuluyah. later at the mosque in this town
his words marked the door to He told me that the killing in
The death of a boy at the hands of his father opened the door to
killing, he said. It didn't only open it, it broke
it down and it couldn't be
I remember the preacher knotted his words, it's difficult to
close that door and his death made others dare to kill.
I told this story in a book I wrote about Iraq
called "Night Draws Near."
was that it illustrated somehow Athe brutality of that country.s
It was a convenient reading and not an uncommon story, the way
we dehumanize other people, make their actions inscrutable,
perceive their motivations as driven by hatred, understood
their ideology as no more than
war on them that much easier. For a generation the Middle East
has been dehumanized. They are a Muslim world.
And that dehumanization has made
Perhaps more palatable. To be honest I shuttered at the
thought that the telling of this
Is that what it really showed? story fed that narrative.
brutal country. SOr I wondered was it something
deeper, something less
Sabah's death to me was less perceptible.
a tale of the repercussions of a country turned upside down.
A landscape that could give rise
In that reading I thought it was to such a crime.
of these unintended a metaphconsequences.vastation
And to me that's the most powerful lesson of our
experience in Iraq and its
Unintended consequences. legacy in the Middle East.
States came as a liberator, In oalmost immediately,ited
it became an occupier.
a catalyst for consequences that But most important it served as
Forces that reshaped not only Iraq but the rest of the region.
Forces that once took years,
in months, there and elsewhere. The lightening export of almostd
nihilist ideologies,
of sectarian and ethnic lines sometimes orchestrated a
changing notion of identity and a much more difficult to define
sense of malaise, a notion of loss.
The list goes on in a war that
And these same forces that I still goes on.
town of Thuluyah, too. mentioned soon transformed this
tradition. The town was steeped in
desert. TNo one could ask a favor theree
unless they first spent three days with their host.
Lunch for a stranger, any stranger, was requisite.
Even a simple visit would prompt
sweets, coffee, tea, then probably another glass of water.
And after the invasion of 2003, the men meant to uphold these
traditions, the tribal leaders
With Saddam and his government inherited the town.
But in the months that followed Sabah's death, the death of this
informer, the tribal leaders
dynamics the American invasion soon felt overwhelmed by the
In essence, they were Sunnis, and Shiites long oppressed
were now ascendant in Iraq. The village was left to fend for
itself. The country was occupied by the
Americans now, and that wasn't
One of the tribal leaders put it to me this way.
"A ball of string and nobody
The preacher I told you about knewas even blunter,d."
this Mullah Nadhim, a "tsunami," he called it.
Now this preacher was a remarkable man, if I can use
that adjective without being
I think I have another picture positive.
He was only 25 but he had already led the family's mosque
for seven years, and his words
town turned to religion. assumed more important as the
saw no end to the occupation. The strike between Sunnis and
Shiites was mounting. And in the preacher's view the
Sunnis in this town needed a
to defend their interests. militia, they needed armed men
a place in the government, you "If you lose and cannot get
he told me have something to fight with,"
It creates a balance of power. back in December 2003.
cell of al Qaeda in Iraq came Abtogether, an insurgent groupt
that really had nothing to do with the group in Afghanistan
but was still led by some foreigners.
Only nine people, back then,
This preacher, himself, Mullah Nadhim, was still
part of the Islamic army. But by 2006, two years later,
al Qaeda had grown to 500 people
And by this time, Mullah Nadhim, in Thuluyah.
"I couldn't stop myself from the preacher, had joined it.
he explained to me. beinThe words that followedave,"
are both universal and specific,
"As one person, you can't be I thought.
turns out to be wrong." The insurgents soon wrapped
themselves in the rhetoric of faith and fatherland.
They would defend the people's
occupiers and Shiites didoing their bidding.an
But their real success relied on
crime. a tactic borrowed from organized
on the violence they applied They adhered to no limits
and those supposed to be against their opponents
In all, more than 200 people their allies.
in the town. were killed as collaborators
with a bullet Sto the back of the head.d
Occasionally, their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned.
No one could smoke
Insurgents talked of shutting down schools, which they
denounced as an instrument
There were woman of occupation.
divorced their husbands. married to policemen,
though. By then most of the police
had already resigned. Those who didn't, of course,
were killed.
was beheaded One of them, I remember
Not even the tribal leaders, by the dull end of a shovel.
this father to kill his son, the same ones who had ordered
One of them I remember hired felt safe.
Another was ambushed, his leg riddled with bullets,
and he still limps. Grenades were thrown twice
at the house of another one,
this town on the Tigris at the time as a "battlefield."
Together they received
with Americans in 2003 pictures of their meetings
By the beginning of 2007, the insurgents had taken over
Thuluyah and no one was safe. Much is made of the surge,
a word many of you all have probably heard about.
It's celebrated as the success
How Bush administration's decision to send more troops
rather than withdraw saved Iraq from civil war, chaos, anarchy
and even genocide that was going
General Petraeus obviously has on back in 2006 in and 2007.
President Bush claims it as an hitched his career to the idea.
steeliness. American diplomats and senior
officers cited as the underpinning of their narrative
that after many years we've finally figured out how to wage
these kinds of wars.
to win. And I always thought that wasw
exaggerated and perhaps not even
Far more important than the surge was the revolt in Sunni
regions like Anbar Province against the insurgents.
A powerful Shiite cleric, a man named Muqtada Sadr also ordered
his men to lay down their arms
stopped a lot of fighting around thas well. and that
As much as strategy, there was
fortunes of the insurgency, a few of them our own doing.he
And that was especially the case
In fact, change in Thuluyah began with a blurry picture.
I have to say I was always
the way that men liked to cling stto pictures like artifacts.h,
And these pictures weren't
There's certainly no moment of family portraits, though.
They were gory pictures and they tranquility.
that insurgents charted during chronicled the trail of blood
Men seemed to cling to them in their reign in Thuluyah.
how grotesque the violence grew macabre fascithere., shocked at
One of these pictures showed the
impaled on a metal stake near a head of a bridge. policeman
For four days it stayed there.
take it down. HSoon after, Ibrahim Salah,o
a police lieutenant,
It was Ramadan, Islam's most was kidnapped.
time of truce, and after three sacred month, that once marked a
was returned to his family. daHis hands were bound withdy
electric wire.
his head was gone. There were burns to his body and
years of fighting since the Byfather had killed his son.ee
For a long time residents had often tacitly accepted the
killings of people insurgents deemed collaborators and spies.
But the killing of this guy,
seemed to go too far. tHe was actually loved in the,
town. His family was good.
And all the sudden in that one
In a matter of weeks the tide turned against the armed groups,
residents stopped providing these militants shelter,
al Qaeda in Iraq. They pleaded for police for
return to their jobs and these
earlier re-exerted themselves. tribal leaders that I mentioned
I've been talking about, Most importantly, the preacher
his allies and denounced them Mullah from his mosque.gainst
"Al Qaeda must depart," he declared.
Now, Mullah Nadhim soon emerged as a leader of an
American-backed militia of former fighters
helping cripple the group with intelligence that
only a convert could provide. A year later only a dozen or so
fighters remained.
people from al Qaeda and Iraq Only a dozremained.insurgents,
The rest were vanquished
and most importantly, by Mullah Nadhim's men.ice
After years of fighting this
come to realize the insurgency preacher told me that he had
balance of power between Shiites was failing to create that
the interest of the Sunni and Sunnis,community.t defending
Even today, in one of our more
al Qaeda's ideology. recent interviews, he defended
he once called it to me as we ate lunch together.
"But in practice," he said
sentiments against his him it had only managed to turn
"We eventually entered a dark tunnel with no light at the
end," was the way he put it.
contrite but confident. "The choice that we had made,"
he said, "just didn't bear fruit."
I've often been struck by how the war in Iraq was said to have
been carried out for the highest
this talk of freedom and liberty of aims, bringing democracy, all
it turned out to be. and how base and even vulgar
were convenient. Loyalties were fickle, alliances
in a project that, in the end, Partners recorded then deserted
the violence at all costs. became a question of stopping
So many had died at that point. But to claim success in anything
else, say a legitimate
just and effective institutions, government, the creation of
And this was a war better lives, would be a lie.
the ones we told others and the ones we told ourselves.
Mullah Nadhim, that cleric
should have understood that. I talked about, maybe
of him. I think IHere he is.er picture
It 2008, this preacher
Here he's pictured near his was a mmosque.t town.
He had gone from critic,
Crowds now spilled outside the to insurgent, to American ally.
in rapt attention at his doors of his family's mosque
He led the council that oversaw the hundreds of armed men
gathered in the American-backed militia fighting the insurgents.
He was anything but bashful in
candidate for parliament. The simple mention of his name,e
I remember, Mullah Nadhim,
the numerous checkpoints that had been created in this fight
against al Qaeda. You got to the edge of town,
you said Mullah Nadhim's name,
got into the downtown. and you soon
me in describing those tribal Heleaders that ruled Thuluyahith
soon after the invasion:
Then Iraqi security forces limited.
charge that is he deemed arrested him the next year on
The Americans had once embraced this man, Mullah Nadhim.
Now in the words of a military
his arrest "A matter for the spokesman they considered
In public, the prime minister called for his release, in
private one of his senior aides with wry grin said he had once
asked the preacher how many people he had killed while he
was a leader of al Qaeda. Four months would passed before
the Mullah Nadhim was freed from
Hussein's former hometown. a prison in Tikrit near Saddam
greeted him as a 12-vehicle convoy of policemen and officers
and tribal leaders, sirens
His enemies actually showed up blaring, escorted him home.
They joined hundreds of others there.
But even then it was clear to me to pay their respects.
no longer represented the power that he once did.m
I remember a soldier's question at the outskirts of town.
"Mullah Who?" he asked me.
Mullah Nadhim once displayed In his reception room,
with a sniper rifle surrounded a picture of himself
turned American allies, and a US soldier smiling broadly.
When I met him after his
jail, he had put it in a folder and tucked it in a cluttered
drawer. Here is what he said of his
former allies now.
no creditability, none at all. "The Americans have
them, I'm going to show them If anyone tries to work with
this is what happens when you deal with the Americans.
Don't be deceived by them,
As for his own alliance with don't let hem exploit you."
"We had no other choice." Mullah Nadhim said he no longer
had ambitions for parliament. "Politics require the art of
lying," he explained to me. He even seemed to acknowledge
his own rise
"If we talk about a strong man and just as precipitous fall.
"there is none." these days," he admitted,
had brought an end "Order," he said to me,
But by order he meant those tribal leaders, the same men
who had ordered the father
And as Mullah Nadhim put it, to kill his son.
I've covered Iraq for eight "years now, even longer if you"
count trips there in 1998 and 2002.
It's been a long haul.
why I keep going back. And often asked myself
again the other night after I thinI did a programuestion
on Wisconsin Public Radio.
we should leave Iraq, that we'd spent too much, sacrificed too
much to stay any longer.
but not in the way most might. I wanted to argue the contrary
military presence there, that more money spent in Iraq
will make things any better.
I suspect it probably won't. In the long run,
But even if we withdraw, even if We've made a mess of it so far.
think we have an obligation to we quit spending money, I still
we've done. The United States started a war
and we have to recognize its
We have to take responsibility consequences, good and bad.
think we have yet. for our actions, and I don't
I stay in Iraq because part of Putting it another way, I think
was all for. me wants to understand what it
over so many years when it comes There have been so many lies
with a whole search for weapons to tof mass destruction.ting
Saddam never had anything to do with Osama bin Laden, however
much argument to the contrary.
we helped bring it there. AIt is true that Saddam is goner
now and that Saddam was one of
dictators. the world's more sinister
have to pay for him to go? But what price did Iraq
was it worth it? Or more bluntly, again,
as I return to this town, I oThuluyah, time and again.tion
There was a flower I would see
It called the Mirabilis Jalapa. Near the town's eloquent villas
with their well-kept lawns
fuchsia blossoms of this flower andsometimes grow wild.ly
They're known as
And they're renowned for their the four o'clock flower.
a long time, lost to any garden, ability to stay underground for
when conditions change. And on those days I returned
after the Mullah Nadhim's fall
near a house of one of they were blossoming
I'm trying to find the tribal leaders.
Here is how one of these another picture.
"Right now, praise God, we have trthe first word again inme.
Thuluyah," he told me.
a problem comes to the --." "RigThis is him here,o has
"...to seek a solution."
like 2003, my first visit there, In other words, 2010 felt a lot
presiding over that biblical with these same tribal leaders
A footnote to this war, as incidental as it was
forgettable, that first American
had wrecked and remade Thuluyah. military operation back in 2003
turned to desert and there was Hundreds were killed, farms
that prevailed. stillThuluyah's sufferingance
was part of Iraq's suffering, lamented Mullah Nadhim,
the cleric. Seven years later, though,
Thuluyah is what it was after Saddam's fall.
The chain of events the Americans unleashed bringing it
back to where it had started. As the Americans leave, the men
I met there gathered for lunch
They had the same question at a friend's house.
"The war never had to happen," I did, what was it all for?
"It was all a needless waste." one of them told me,
but as a town," he said, "Everything has its price,
I spent much of last year in "we paid a very high price."
of the pieces were part of the this town of Thuluyah, and two
Prize in 2010. entry that won the Pulitzer
but I always thought there was The story fascinated me,
I find myself still haunted by something more to it.
those years ago, that young man the deathnamed Sabah.ormer all
Not because of what he did, but because of what his father
was forced to do. And how the smallest of
interventions unleashed such
I think it's told me perhaps seismic events.
the war is not over, it will not something more important too:
former ambassador once put it to end for a long time, and as a
of a play that will last many macts and we'll be dealing with
its repercussions for a long, long time.
Especially these days there's a sense of the linear in America
about Iraq. We invaded the country,
we occupied it, we defeated the insurgency and now we're
leaving.
living there is that there's One thing I can tell you from
And again I return to this town reof Thuluyah where there's at.
story often told about the
In one telling of the tale a unforgiving ways of the desert.
inciting a vendetta. Bedouin's father was killed
Bedouin had yet to exact his 40 years had past and the
"Why?", this Bedouin was asked, -- he replied, "Not yet."
Not so long ago I went back to
forced to kill his son. theNow all these years later was
the father was understandably still bitter.
And he recalled the execution with anger.
"What happened has happened," he said.
I remember his eyes were steely,
"I don't want to turn back the his body was taut.
The father was never rude to me openly, but his anger smoldered
enough to understand
I remember his son Salah that I wasn't welcomed there.
He ran toward me. "Forgive my father," he said,
"He is very angry at the past." The son walked with me to the
road outside. His hands shook and his body
trembled. Unshaven, he nervously smoked a
cigarette.
of testimony of someone who is He blurted out words of the kind
"He is my brother," he said. yet to be heard.
None of it had to happen." "From my flesh, from my blood.
and his brother, both of whom Affired the shots that killeder
Sabah, fled the town. While they were gone
the father's mother died, buried without them.
They would not return to
"This was the injustice Thuluyaof Thuluyah years.
and its tribal leaders,"
"Go to the main street and ask the brother told me.
an injustice was committed." anyone and he will tell you that
buried next to his grandmother The cemetery where Sabah is
past irrigation canals and olive lies down a road outside town
It's washed of color, there's no trees that are coated with dust.
from the sun. And save for the wind and sound
of distant cars, it's quiet which I always thought made it
feel even more vulnerable.
And that grief will stay until "I have grief.
his brother told me as we wandered around the cemetery.
Only three broken bricks, scarred wide by bird droppings,
marked his brother's grave. Scrub brush bearing thorns
grew nearby.
the tombstone," he said softly, "We haven't had time."
It was the last time I'd visit
Thuluyah, a footnote of the war. the town, a place called
of this informer's brother And I remember my last image was
tightly behind his back. standing with his hands clasped
in a fist. One of them was balled
at him. Not yetIt's still early. looked
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]