Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Anthony Shadid, "Reporting on Faith, War and the Fate of Iraq"  December 2, 2010 UP530      cc >> Charles Cohen: Thank you for your patience. Because of the size 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 on, and events dealing with scholarship about Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It's my feeling that at this point in time, interfaith cooperation is no longer an option, it's mandatory. We're delighted to welcome Anthony Shadid back to the UW campus. This is a joint event of the Lubar Institute and the Center for Journalism Ethics on whose advisory board I'm proud to serve under Steve Ward, whom I will be introducing momentarily. The genesis of this event came over a year ago when Steve and I were thinking that we would like our two units to collaborate and wondering what that 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 Catholic church, because we wanted something to do with religion. 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. [LAUGHTER] But he's a Badger, so he knows this. Indeed it wouldn't be December without that. Putting on an event like this always requires a great deal of work. I want to thank the people on my staff, most particularly Karen Turino, Ariana Horn, Sari Judge, who 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 nasty details that make the ease of your coming here so possible. I also want to mention the funders, the Lubars who have given the founding endowment gift to the institute, to the Center for Journalism Ethics, we have enjoyed additional funding support from the University of Wisconsin Lectures Committee which has been very generous for this event, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Additional logistical support has been provided by the Middle East Studies Program. 

Before we go any farther, I'll just ask you to turn off your electronic devices except for those that are necessary to keep bodily functions continuing. [LAUGHTER] And it's my pleasure then to introduce my colleague, Steven Ward. [APPLAUSE] >> 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 we'll make this happen again and again in the future. No conflict and no war occurs without a battle for hearts and minds at home and abroad. And one can say war and ideology travel together. 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. 

He's one of America's leading foreign reporters, and he lives at the intersection of war, religion and journalism. Please note the phrase of the title of his talk: "The Truths We Tell." I suspect he wants to talk about those narratives, how they become to be called truths and whether they really are. 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 Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post. And over a 15-year career he has reported for most countries in the Middle East and beyond. Born in Oklahoma City, he graduated from UW-Madison in 1990 with degrees in journalism and political science, and he studied Arabic. He's the author of two award-winning books, and he has won numerous journalism awards including not one, but two Pulitzer awards, Pulitzer Prizes, both for his coverage and reporting on Iraq. The first Pulitzer Prize in 2004 was for his reporting of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 2010 he won a second Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Iraq as the US began to withdraw. 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 departs, and its people and leaders struggle to deal with the legacy of war, and to shape the nation's future." And his assignments, of course, 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 whether this made up for it, Anthony, the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication awarded him the Ralph Nafziger Award which recognizes young alumni. And in 2005 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award for the Wisconsin Alumni Association. As a former war reporter, I'm happy, I was happy, very happy to approach Anthony Shadid about this lecture. In an era of skepticism about journalists, it is important that students and the public have opportunities to discuss public affairs with journalists of the dedication and integrity of Anthony Shadid. When I sent Anthony a proposed itinerary for his visit, I jammed it with as many things I could put on it. Class visits, student lunches, breakfast with journalists, whatever, and a talk to boot. He graciously and immediately said, I'll do it all, no problem, Steve. That was way too easy. But thank you for your generosity and to your family for coming all this way to be with us tonight. 

After he talks we'll have room for questions and I'm looking forward to a very simulating time with you tonight. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> Anthony Shadid: Well, I want to thank Steven for that 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 we're going to give this a try. And of course I've got a cold and I'm probably going to lose my voice halfway through the lecture, but let's hope it works out better than that. As Steven mentioned, I am an alumni of the university here, something I'm very proud of. It's always a pleasure for me to come back to Wisconsin. I may have grown up in Oklahoma, but in many ways, in more ways than not I think Wisconsin is actually home to me. 

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 at the Daily Cardinal. I was all bundled up. I was riding my bike down State Street. I wanted to find those first editions of the Badger Herald and the Daily Cardinal. I was a campus editor at the time. I had to make sure that we weren't scooped. Here's an apology to current and past Badger Herald staffers, but I really hated that newspaper. I'm very sorry. [LAUGHTER] I have to say, and I say that after meeting the managing editor today who is a pleasant and very, very great young journalist. So don't take it too personally. 

I have to say, I credit Wisconsin with two things. One was critical thinking. And I think that's something the university has always taken pride, and it's something I certainly take pride in my education here. And I don't think anything has proven more important in my career since then. That ability to question what you're told, to be suspicious, to never accept things as they're portrayed. I learned that in the classroom. I learned it at the Cardinal. And I learned it with friends whom I spent way too many hours talking high politics and the very lowest gossip at the Black Bear Lounge. The other thing I credit Wisconsin for, and I probably should say blame here, is a very worst addiction to the Green Bay Packers. [LAUGHTER] I could easily have written another book if I had channeled all the time I spent reading the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website, the Green Bay Press Gazette every morning. 

It's sick. Now I'm dragging my wife, my nine-year-old daughter and my seven-month-old son to the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field on Sunday. It's just pitiful. It really is. [APPLAUSE] You know, in Baghdad in the earliest days I managed to hear Packers games on my satellite phone. Now the phone wasn't cheap. A bunch of dollars a minute I have to say. And in a few months my alarm bureau chief was getting grilled for what amounted to what I think was a $20,000 phone bill. He came to me. Outrageous, I told him. 

Then I asked a little more sheepishly, can they tell which computer the satellite phone was connected to? To my relief they couldn't. That of course is another rule every journalist probably should uphold and that's never to tell the truth on your expenses, but that's an entirely different story. [LAUGHTER] I just got back from Baghdad, on a more serious note, I just got back from Baghdad a few weeks ago, and I was trying to talk to my daughter, Laila, who's here tonight with us, in the most cursory of ways of what I saw in the last trip. 122 people had died in just two incidents when I was there. One was a church attack that people may have heard about. 53 people were killed in a church in the Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada. Two days later there was a string of bombings across the city that told us, contrary to popular perception, that the war in Iraq is far from over. It made no sense, what I told her. And she didn't really understand. In the end what I tried to convey to her were numbers, so many people died. 

But what are numbers really, other than grounds for debate? In the end it's about stories. And if I learned one thing I think in 15 years of being a foreign correspondent, it's that only stories really matter. And that brings me to the topic that I wanted to talk to you all today, Baghdad, a place that I spent probably more than any other place the past eight years. 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 I said, people mistakenly think the war is over. It's a story of unintended consequences, that phrase that I think perhaps defines the war in Iraq more than any other. It's a story that I think is 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 tent that was set up for condolences eight years ago this March. I remember the recitation of the Koran was playing from a scratchy cassette, and I was there with these people sipping bitter Arabic coffee. I remember an American helicopter was rumbling overhead, and the men around me hailed from different tribes in this lush town along the Tigris River called Thuluyah. And on the screen here is a scene of Thuluyah. 

All these people had arrived to pay their respects for a beefy 15-year-old with a mop of curly black hair and a face that was still rounded by adolescence. He was one of three people killed a day before in June 2003 in an American raid that was called Peninsula Strike. I remember the words of one of the men there in that tent. He was a soft spoken judge. He called the boy's death, in this American operation in Peninsula Strike, an omen. The future is going to be very dark, he warned me then. We're seeing each day become worse than the last. Now for the judge and dozens of these other mourners and tribal leaders who were gathered on this sweltering afternoon, and I can tell you it was very hot that day, the boy's death was simply a tragedy. To the rest of Iraq, it was 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 to a war and its aftermath that, like I said, has dragged on for more than seven years. 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 this boy's death would set into motion an epic chain of events that began once the US military set foot in the town, and it still haunts a patch of desert on its forlorn outskirts long after they've departed. The next event in that chain had to do with a tall husky 28-year-old who served as an informer for the Americans on that raid. This guy's name was Sabah and the mourners that day blamed him for the deaths that had brought everyone to these condolences in the tent. I'm trying to do this-- I remember children calling this man Sabah, the "masked man." It was the nickname they had given the informer who had warn a burlap bag over his head during the raid as he ambled through a crowd and identified suspected insurgents to the American troops. I remember the children's chants as I sat inside the funeral tent. "Masked man," they shouted, "Your face is the face of the devil!" Inside the tent no one would dare say this guy's name even though everyone knew who he was. They would only tell me the consequences. 

Of course he'll be killed, one man whispered to me, but not yet. They'll rip him to pieces, another predicted. Now let me tell you a little bit about this town of Thuluyah. Like I said, it was perched on a bend in the Tigris River, and it's one of the prettier locales, I have to say, in Iraq. It escaped the ravages of the American invasion that April two months before. It was a 90-minute drive north of Baghdad and beyond the route that the US military took to 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, in fact. Within weeks though, it would bear the consequences of the invasion's very confusing aftermath. 11 days after Saddam Hussein fell, one of the first insurgent attacks occurred at the edge of the town along an irrigation canal that was soon nicknamed The Valley of Death. 

More attacks followed. And by June, a few months after Saddam had fallen, in response, the US military devised the operation I mentioned earlier, Peninsula Strike. It would represent the first attempt to quell an insurgency that would only grow more intense. These American soldiers arrived after midnight on this June night. Humvees and troop transports barreled down these dirt roads past orange groves. There were F-16s, A-10s, AC-130 war planes. All of them were heard but not seen. Soldiers hurried from camouflage boats on the banks of the Tigris, and they went past gardens of okra and patches of purple flowers. The soldiers shouted in English. The residents of Thuluyah shook their head in frightened incomprehension. 

They were yelling and yelling, one inhabitant told me. Many of them raised a white handkerchief in a universal sign of surrender. Many of them were blindfolded, bound with plastic cuffs and forced to lie on their stomachs. One of them told me he was helpless as he listened to his wife and five children cry 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 barked at him, this Saad --. "I'm a taxi driver," he replied. From somewhere near 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. Others recognized Sabah too. Those not blindfolded noticed his yellow sandals and his mutilated right thumb. It had been severed above the 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. The Americans soon departed but they left behind a myriad of grievances in the town. And by the time I got there, there was confusion, fear, and most of all it was vengeance. 

No one could do anything about the soldiers, but they could do something about this informer named Sabah. Now it's pretty common these days after Saddam's fall to see a resurgence of tribal authority. It was a brutal frontier justice which had come to fill the lawless void back in 2003. The boy was a member of the Aani tribe, and the informer was a Jabbouri, another tribe. That tribe was the town's biggest and justice would have to be done. And powered by Saddam's fall, the tribal leaders, men like this man, decided to met out their notion of it. Either Sabah's family would kill Sabah, the informer, or they 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. Then he stalled, insisting that he needed permission from the Americans before he did 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 in the town, everyone 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. His name was Mullah Nadhim, and I want you to remember this name. He was the son and grandson of a preacher and a preacher himself. Oops, I'm trying to get you a picture of Mullah Nadhim. 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 a preacher himself. And as a religious man he was sympathetic to the pleas of the informer's brother and father. No one had proven Sabah's guilt, the preacher said. Even worse, he suspected some of the tribal leaders were trying to cover up their own collaboration with the Americans by making Sabah a scapegoat. He told me that he agreed to meet Sabah the next day, but as he put it to me rather chillingly, "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's brother and father led Sabah behind the house nestled in orchards of fig and almond trees, vineyards and groves of oranges and tangerines. His brother said that he told Sabah not to blame them, that it wasn't their fault. Sabah never resisted. And five shots later he was dead. When I met the father a few weeks later he told me words that I still haven't forgotten all these years later. 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 about, called it. And he denounced it three days later at the mosque in this town of Thuluyah. He told me that the killing in his words marked the door to hell. 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 closed again. 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." And the reaction of some readers was that it illustrated somehow the brutality of that country. 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 fanaticism, all as a way to make 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 war, what's the word? Perhaps more palatable. To be honest I shuttered at the thought that the telling of this story fed that narrative. Is that what it really showed? Simply brutality, a notion of a brutal country. Or I wondered was it something deeper, something less perceptible. Sabah's death to me was less a story of brutality and more a tale of the repercussions of a country turned upside down. A landscape that could give rise to such a crime. In that reading I thought it was a metaphor for the devastation of these unintended consequences. And to me that's the most powerful lesson of our experience in Iraq and its legacy in the Middle East. 

Unintended consequences. In one narrative the United States came as a liberator, almost immediately, it became an occupier. But most important it served as a catalyst for consequences that most of us never foresaw. Forces that reshaped not only Iraq but the rest of the region. Forces that once took years, even decades to unfold, gathered in months, there and elsewhere. The lightening export of almost nihilist ideologies, the remarkable hardening 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 still goes on. And these same forces that I mentioned soon transformed this town of Thuluyah, too. The town was steeped in tradition. The customs of Bedouins from the desert. 

No one could ask a favor there unless they first spent three days with their host. Lunch for a stranger, any stranger, was requisite. Even a simple visit would prompt a glass of water followed by 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 inherited the town. With Saddam and his government gone there was no one else. But in the months that followed Sabah's death, the death of this informer, the tribal leaders soon felt overwhelmed by the dynamics the American invasion had set into motion. 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 going well either. One of the tribal leaders put it to me this way. 

"A ball of string and nobody knew where it started." The preacher I told you about was even blunter, this Mullah Nadhim, a "tsunami," he called it. Now this preacher was a remarkable man, if I can use that adjective without being positive. I think I have another picture of him in here too. He was only 25 but he had already led the family's mosque for seven years, and his words assumed more important as the town turned to religion. Mullah Nadhim, this preacher, 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 militia, they needed armed men to defend their interests. "If you lose and cannot get a place in the government, you have something to fight with," he told me back in December 2003. It creates a balance of power. About 10 months later the first cell of al Qaeda in Iraq came together, an insurgent group that really had nothing to do with the group in Afghanistan but was still led by some foreigners. 

Only nine people, back then, belonged from Thuluyah. 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 in Thuluyah. And by this time, Mullah Nadhim, the preacher, had joined it. "I couldn't stop myself from being carried away by the wave," he explained to me. The words that followed are both universal and specific, I thought. "As one person, you can't be right, and everyone else turns out to be wrong." The insurgents soon wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of faith and fatherland. They would defend the people's dignity against American occupiers and Shiites doing their bidding. But their real success relied on a tactic borrowed from organized crime. They adhered to no limits on the violence they applied against their opponents and those supposed to be their allies. 

In all, more than 200 people were killed as collaborators in the town. Some of them were executed with a bullet to the back of the head. Occasionally, their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned. No one could smoke in the streets. Insurgents talked of shutting down schools, which they denounced as an instrument of occupation. There were woman married to policemen, divorced their husbands. That didn't really matter though. By then most of the police had already resigned. Those who didn't, of course, were killed. One of them, I remember was beheaded by the dull end of a shovel. 

Not even the tribal leaders, the same ones who had ordered this father to kill his son, felt safe. One of them I remember hired armed men to guard his house. Another was ambushed, his leg riddled with bullets, and he still limps. Grenades were thrown twice at the house of another one, who remembered Thuluyah, this town on the Tigris at the time as a "battlefield." Together they received pictures of their meetings with Americans in 2003 as both threat and blackmail. 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 of the counterinsurgency. 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 on back in 2006 in and 2007. General Petraeus obviously has hitched his career to the idea. President Bush claims it as an example of his self-described 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. In other words, we learned how to win. And I always thought that was exaggerated and perhaps not even true. 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 around this time, and that stopped a lot of fighting as well. As much as strategy, there was a lot of luck in reversing the fortunes of the insurgency, few of them our own doing. And that was especially the case in this town, in Thuluyah. In fact, change in Thuluyah began with a blurry picture. I have to say I was always struck in my trips to Thuluyah, the way that men liked to cling to pictures like artifacts. And these pictures weren't family portraits, though. 

There's certainly no moment of tranquility. They were gory pictures and they chronicled the trail of blood that insurgents charted during their reign in Thuluyah. Men seemed to cling to them in macabre fascination, shocked at how grotesque the violence grew there. One of these pictures showed the head of a traffic policeman impaled on a metal stake near a bridge. For four days it stayed there. His family was too afraid to take it down. Soon after, Ibrahim Salah, a police lieutenant, was kidnapped. It was Ramadan, Islam's most sacred month, that once marked a time of truce, and after three days of negotiations his body was returned to his family. His hands were bound with electric wire. There were burns to his body and his head was gone. 

By this time it had been three years of fighting since the father had killed his son. For a long time residents had often tacitly accepted the killings of people insurgents deemed collaborators and spies. But the killing of this guy, this policeman, Ibrahim Salah, seemed to go too far. He was actually loved in the town. His family was good. And all the sudden in that one moment the town had enough. 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 tribal leaders that I mentioned earlier re-exerted themselves. Most importantly, the preacher I've been talking about, Mullah Nadhim, turned against his allies and denounced them from his mosque. "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. Only a dozen or so insurgents, people from al Qaeda and Iraq remained. The rest were vanquished by the US military, police and most importantly, Mullah Nadhim's men. After years of fighting this preacher told me that he had come to realize the insurgency was failing to create that balance of power between Shiites and Sunnis, nor was it defending the interest of the Sunni community. Even today, in one of our more recent interviews, he defended al Qaeda's ideology. "A good project," he once called it to me as we ate lunch together. "But in practice," he said it had only managed to turn sentiments against his him  and his notion of jihad. "We eventually entered a dark tunnel with no light at the end," was the way he put it. He nodded to me, 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 of aims, bringing democracy, all this talk of freedom and liberty and how base and even vulgar it turned out to be. Loyalties were fickle, alliances were convenient. Partners recorded then deserted in a project that, in the end, became a question of stopping the violence at all costs. That's not a bad thing. So many had died at that point. But to claim success in anything else, say a legitimate government, the creation of just and effective institutions, better lives, would be a lie. And this was a war that had far too many lies, the ones we told others and the ones we told ourselves. Mullah Nadhim, that cleric I talked about, maybe should have understood that. I think I have another picture of him. Here he is. 

It 2008, this preacher was a man about town. Here he's pictured near his mosque. He had gone from critic, to insurgent, to American ally. Crowds now spilled outside the doors of his family's mosque in rapt attention at his thunderous sermons. 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 suggesting himself as a possible candidate for parliament. The simple mention of his name, I remember, Mullah Nadhim, ensured passage through 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, and you soon got into the downtown. Here is a word that he used with me in describing those tribal leaders that ruled Thuluyah soon after the invasion: limited. Then Iraqi security forces arrested him the next year on charge that is he deemed political. 

The Americans had once embraced this man, Mullah Nadhim. Now in the words of a military spokesman they considered his arrest "A matter for the government of Iraq." 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 a prison in Tikrit near Saddam Hussein's former hometown. I remember celebratory gunfire greeted him as a 12-vehicle convoy of policemen and officers and tribal leaders, sirens blaring, escorted him home. His enemies actually showed up there. They joined hundreds of others to pay their respects. But even then it was clear to me that Mullah Nadhim no longer represented the power that he once did. I remember a soldier's question at the outskirts of town. "Mullah Who?" he asked me. In his reception room, Mullah Nadhim once displayed a picture of himself with a sniper rifle surrounded by Iraqi police, insurgents turned American allies, and a US soldier smiling broadly. 

When I met him after his release, after that time in 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. "The Americans have no creditability, none at all. If anyone tries to work with them, I'm going to show them the picture and tell them this is what happens when you deal with the Americans. Don't be deceived by them, don't let hem exploit you." As for his own alliance with them, he explained, "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 and just as precipitous fall. "If we talk about a strong man these days," he admitted, "there is none." "Order," he said to me, had brought an end to the law of the jungle." But by order he meant those tribal leaders, the same men who had ordered the father to kill his son. And as Mullah Nadhim put it, "That order cannot be changed."  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. 

And often asked myself why I keep going back. I think I asked the question again the other night after I did a program on Wisconsin Public Radio. Caller after caller said we should leave Iraq, that we'd spent too much, sacrificed too much to stay any longer. I wanted to argue the contrary but not in the way most might. I don't no that a longer military presence there, that more money spent in Iraq will make things any better. In the long run, I suspect it probably won't. We've made a mess of it so far. But even if we withdraw, even if we quit spending money, I still think we have an obligation to make a moral reckoning of what we've done. The United States started a war and we have to recognize its consequences, good and bad. We have to take responsibility for our actions, and I don't think we have yet. 

Putting it another way, I think I stay in Iraq because part of me wants to understand what it was all for. There have been so many lies over so many years when it comes to the story there, starting with a whole search for weapons of mass destruction. Saddam never had anything to do with Osama bin Laden, however much argument to the contrary. Al Qaeda only came to Iraq after we helped bring it there. It is true that Saddam is gone now and that Saddam was one of the world's more sinister dictators. But what price did Iraq have to pay for him to go? Or more bluntly, again, was it worth it? I often ask myself that question as I return to this town, Thuluyah, time and again. There was a flower I would see when I did return. It called the Mirabilis Jalapa. Near the town's eloquent villas with their well-kept lawns and vineyards, the lovely fuchsia blossoms of this flower sometimes grow wild. They're known as the four o'clock flower. 

And they're renowned for their ability to stay underground for a long time, lost to any garden, and then to sprout again when conditions change. And on those days I returned after the Mullah Nadhim's fall they were blossoming near a house of one of the tribal leaders. I'm trying to find another picture. Here is how one of these tribal leaders put it to me. "Right now, praise God, we have the first word again in Thuluyah," he told me. "Right now, anyone who has a problem comes to the --." This is him here, "...to seek a solution." In other words, 2010 felt a lot like 2003, my first visit there, with these same tribal leaders presiding over that biblical execution. A footnote to this war, as incidental as it was forgettable, that first American military operation back in 2003 had wrecked and remade Thuluyah. Hundreds were killed, farms turned to desert and there was still an unrequited vengeance that prevailed. Thuluyah's suffering 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 at a friend's house. They had the same question I did, what was it all for? "The war never had to happen," one of them told me, "It was all a needless waste." "Everything has its price, but as a town," he said, "we paid a very high price." I spent much of last year in this town of Thuluyah, and two of the pieces were part of the entry that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. The story fascinated me, but I always thought there was something more to it. I find myself still haunted by the death of that informer all those years ago, that young man named Sabah. Not because of what he did, but because of what his father was forced to do. And how the smallest of interventions unleashed such seismic events. I think it's told me perhaps something more important too: the war is not over, it will not end for a long time, and as a former ambassador once put it to me, we're only in the first act of a play that will last many acts 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. 

One thing I can tell you from living there is that there's really nothing linear about it. And again I return to this town of Thuluyah where there's a story often told about the unforgiving ways of the desert. In one telling of the tale a Bedouin's father was killed inciting a vendetta. 40 years had past and the Bedouin had yet to exact his revenge. "Why?", this Bedouin was asked, -- he replied, "Not yet." Not so long ago I went back to the house of this father who was forced to kill his son. Now all these years later 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, his body was taut. "I don't want to turn back the pages of the past," he said. 

The father was never rude to me openly, but his anger smoldered enough to understand that I wasn't welcomed there. I remember his son Salah intervened and apologized. 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. He blurted out words of the kind of testimony of someone who is yet to be heard. "He is my brother," he said. "From my flesh, from my blood. None of it had to happen." After Sabah's death, his father and his brother, both of whom fired the shots that killed Sabah, fled the town. 

While they were gone the father's mother died, buried without them. They would not return to Thuluyah for three years. "This was the injustice of Thuluyah and its tribal leaders," the brother told me. "Go to the main street and ask anyone and he will tell you that an injustice was committed." The cemetery where Sabah is buried next to his grandmother lies down a road outside town past irrigation canals and olive trees that are coated with dust. It's washed of color, there's no shade to give any respite 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. "I have grief. And that grief will stay until the last minute of my life," 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. 

"We still haven't put the tombstone," he said softly, "We haven't had time." It was the last time I'd visit the town, a place called Thuluyah, a footnote of the war. And I remember my last image was of this informer's brother standing with his hands clasped tightly behind his back. One of them was balled in a fist. Not yet, I thought, as I looked at him. It's still early. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]