A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

The US will eventually give up it's occupation of Iraq and the Iraqis will have yet another death match among themselves. In Iraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory Edward Wong explains that the Iraqi's even have a word for it “sahel.”

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: 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.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

For all of the horrible violence we have witnessed in Iraq no faction has gained an upper hand - sahel.

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

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.

It should come as no surprise that the neocons and the Bush administration just don't get it. Hubris and ignorance are always a dangerous - fatal combination.

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 US occupation of Iraq will end. The military can't sustain it and the American people won't allow it to continue. Wong is reporting that when we leave, be it tomorrow or in two years sahel will happen. Cheney will not give up his dreams of Iraqi oil and the Democrats have shown themselves to be invertebrates so Americas finest will continue to pay the ultimate price for months to come.