Nir Rosen

Outside the Green Zone, any hopes for a better future in post-Saddam Iraq were dashed a long time ago. As early as the summer of 2003, Sunnis had been sufficiently alienated to long for their halcyon days under the Baathists, and since then the situation has deteriorated catastrophically. With Shia death squads torturing and executing Sunnis, Sunni insurgents killing Shia, criminal gangs running rampant and a vicious civil war raging, people frequently ask me: Are things worse for Iraqis now than they were under the man who now stands in the dock?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But the very fact that it can legitimately be asked is horrifying. For Saddam’s Iraq deserved the name given it by the exiled writer Kanan Makiya: “Republic of Fear.” I began to learn why soon after I arrived in the country in April 2003.

He picked me up in his taxi on a busy street, that first spring in Baghdad. In Iraq you never know who will stop for you when you hail a cab. Most taxis were orange and white “Brazili” Volkswagens made in Brazil. When you asked them what the fare was they would disingenuously insist, “No, it’s on me.” When you insisted on paying and asked for a price they would say, “As you wish,” knowing you would be too uncomfortable to pay them what you really wished, and in case you did, they would say, “No, that’s too little.” Taxi drivers were my oracles in Iraq. They knew all the rumors, more often false than true, they were my spies, they knew what explosion had happened in what neighborhood, what neighborhood was off limits thanks to the resistance, the Americans or some other militia. And like their colleagues throughout the world, they were always eager to talk.

My driver was a thin middle-aged man, olive-toned, wiry, bony and angular. The thick hair on his arms was gray, as were his grizzled cheeks and bushy mustache. He had large eyes, sunken and hidden beneath the shadow of his brows. I felt like striking a conversation. “How are things in Baghdad?” Driving, he hung his arm straight out of the window and gazed at it silently as I waited for an answer. Without uttering a word or demonstrating that he had even heard the question, he stared ahead expressionless. Worried, I realized his jaws were tightly clenched and his eyes were glazing. Anxiously I watched a tear swell and burst off his eyelashes, slowly making its way down his cheek. I resisted the urge to reach over and wipe it for him. “I’m sorry,” I said, “did somebody from your family die?”

He struggled to answer me. In a controlled whisper, he said, “We all died.”

In those first weeks, I began to learn what he meant. I was present when family members exhumed the corpses of loved ones killed by Saddam. I even stumbled upon my own treasure trove of documents in an abandoned police station, papers that revealed the reality of life under the dictator. But then new horrors took center stage, pushing the old ones aside.

When I arrived, Iraq’s walls were already covered with leaflets and banners announcing the deaths of “martyrs.” At first, the walls bore the names of those killed by the liberating American military, but soon there were new martyrs, victims of the nihilistic anarchy spreading in the country — the faudha, or chaos, as Iraqis called it. These Iraqis were killed by the criminal violence that sprang up in the power vacuum, and then by the insurgents — Sunni men seeking to kill the “Crusaders and Jews” who were occupying Iraq. Others were killed by the aggressive U.S. military that was now occupying them.

I spent nearly three years writing about the new victims, those killed under the occupation or during the civil wars being fought in Iraq. In my focus on Iraq’s newest victims, I forgot about Saddam’s victims.

The trial of Saddam reminded me of the files I looted from that security station, and of my notes from those first few weeks, which I had forgotten. And as the people of Iraq endure yet another nightmare — one the United States unlocked — it seems important to remember them.

Abdel Satar al Musawi’s dark brown decomposed remains lay on the ground above his former grave. His older brothers sat beside them, holding them and crying. Although he was arrested in 1998 and killed in 2001, they had only learned of his death three days before. They had come to claim his body. “His crime was loving freedom,” said his friend Abdel Karim, who had come to find his own brother.

I had only been in Iraq a few weeks, beginning my career as a journalist. I had opposed the war, not because of illusions I had about Saddam’s brutality, but because I knew that helping the Iraqi people was not on the Bush administration’s agenda, and nothing good would come of war. It was simple to me: A war predicated on lies was wrong, and would subvert democracy at home as well as international law. In the early days of the war, the magazine that sent me asked me if I wanted a gas mask or a suit to protect me from chemical weapons. I scoffed at the need, explaining that I did not believe Iraq had those weapons anymore. I had come to Iraq to give a voice to Iraqis, and this meant restraining my views, and listening to Iraqis. As Iraqis rubbed their eyes and awoke to the new reality in a mix of shock, depression and euphoria, I was as confused as they were, and nothing seemed black-and-white.

With the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of thousands of political prisoners were finally being revealed to their families. Iraqi families could find the files on their loved ones and discover their fate. More often than not, the news was not good.

Several dozen members of the al Musawi family had come to claim four of their brethren from the Karkh cemetery in Haswa, outside of Baghdad and near the Abu Ghraib prison, where many of Saddam’s political prisoners were murdered. All four were cousins: Abdel Sattar al Musawi, born in 1966, from the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, married with two children; Salah Hadi al Musawi, born in 1974, from Baghdad’s Thawra neighborhood; Salah Hasan al Musawi, born in 1971 and also from Thawra; and Saad Qasim al Musawi, born in 1967, from Thawra, married with six children. A family friend, Qasim Ahmad al Maliki, born in 1966 and also from Thawra, married with no children, was also buried in the cemetery. All were killed in 2001.

“They were political prisoners,” a friend of the al Musawis explained, “killed for no reason. There was no justice, no court, no defense.”

The men had come on a bus and in a pickup truck. They carried with them flimsy wooden coffins made of boards and a black flag of mourning. At 7 in the morning, they were the first family in the cemetery that day.

The dafan, or grave digger, Muhammad Muslim Muhammad, was a small man in sweat pants with a buttoned shirt tucked in. He assisted with an obsequious eagerness and I suspected that he was compensating for an unconfessed complicity in the crimes he helped bury.

The Karkh cemetery was the size of a football field, surrounded by a brick wall the height of a man. Eucalyptus trees lined the edges by the wall. The ground was a sandy gray, with mounds marking the shallow graves containing the bodies. Some of the mounds had holes burrowed into them, where animals had fed on the corpses. On a stick in the mound was a card with a number on it. The al Musawi family had the plot numbers for their dead, and Muhammad led them to the first one, striding over other graves. It belonged to Abdel Satar. When they found the grave, the previously silent men collapsed in loud sobs, kneeling on the ground or clinging to one another. They quieted down as the gravedigger undid his work, watching in apprehensive and lachrymose silence, as if still hoping the grave would be empty. The digging slowed as the earth being removed turned to a wet dark red, as if stained with blood. The gravedigger abandoned his shovel and used his hands. The body was the color of the earth, thin and dry. Amid wails of “my brother!” the body was placed on a plastic sheet and wrapped in a kiffin, or white cloth. It was then placed in the wooden coffin, to await the trip to Najaf, where it would be buried in the City of Peace, the biggest cemetery in the world outside of China, and the preferred burial site for all Shias.

As Abdel Sattar’s brothers and a handful of others remained by his coffin, the rest of the family moved on to dig up Saad’s body. It emerged in separate pieces; the bones were placed together by the skull. Saad’s father was present. By 9 in the morning six families had arrived to reclaim their loved ones and their wailing cries could be heard from all corners of the cemetery. I was crying too. Abdel Sattar’s former employer was also present. “He was a lovely boy,” he said of him. I asked if this had happened to many people he knew. Gesturing behind him to the hundreds of graves, he said, “See for yourself.”

I felt ashamed intruding on the pain of the al Musawi family, and I sobbed with them. It was my first month as a journalist and I was not yet able to watch other people’s pain without participating in it. In 1991 Sattar’s relative Daghir Jasim al Musawi tried to escape to Iran following the failed Shia uprising against Saddam, which George Bush the elder encouraged and which was brutally suppressed by Saddam after Bush failed to support it. Daghir visited Sattar before escaping, and this caused all the suffering that befell their family. Eleven men from the al Musawi family were arrested, suspected of taking part in the uprising.

I spoke with one of the men, 29-year-old Husayn Sayer Naama al Musawi from Thawra. He was arrested in the summer of 2001 because he was a relative and Saddam’s secret police thought he might know something. He was held for 70 days in the Saddam City security prison with the four al Musawi cousins who were killed.

In prison they tied Husayn’s hands behind his back and hung him from them, dislocating his shoulders. They tortured him with electricity and beat him with cables and metal rods until he was drenched in his own blood. They wanted to know why Daghir had come to visit him, but he could tell them nothing, since Daghir had only come to visit Sattar.

He would still be able to recognize the faces of the security officers who did this to them, he told me. The prison was run by someone named Saad al Ithawi. There was an officer called Abbas who was drunk during the interrogation and beat Husayn brutally. Executions were carried out by an officer called Hamid. Husayn said, “If I saw them I would seek revenge, I would eat them.”

Before they left, several of the men from the al Musawi family blasted the Arab media for their failure to speak out. “The Arab press failed,” said one. “They were a part of these crimes. They covered it up. They always said Saddam was a hero and they took his money.” Another exhorted me, “Don’t be like Arabs, tell the whole world.”

Some graves had no numbers, meaning that some families never found their loved ones. The al Musawis themselves had not known whether their lost sons were dead or alive until three days before they dug up their bodies. They received the information from a remarkable organization called the Association of Free Prisoners.

Located in the confiscated riverside villa of a former security official in the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad, the association was formed three weeks before, just when the war ended. Muhamad Jamal Abdel Amir, a 28-year-old engineer, volunteered along with 50 or so others. He explained that the organization was created by four former prisoners. It was an entirely Iraqi project; they received no help from outside and had not coordinated their activities with anyone foreign. When Iraqis looted the headquarters of the many security organizations that had terrorized them for so long, people began handing over the files to the association, and its director Ibrahim al Idris. Abdel Amir explained that he had volunteered in order to help Iraq.

On the outside walls of the association’s villa hung many sheets of paper with alphabetical listings of prisoners’ names. Hundreds of desperate relatives ran their fingers down the lists taped to the walls, hoping to learn their fate. A steady stream of men and women visited the wall, reading the names. Inside, past two boys with machine guns who guarded the association, the atmosphere was bustling, as workers rushed back and forth, their faces blocked by the immense piles of documents they carried to different rooms of the house, organizing them by subject. They were entering all the information onto a database, but for now, the dozens of rooms were full of thousands of files going back to the 1960s, stacked on top of each other, stored in sacks, or still in their original file cabinets, marked Da’wa (for the banned Islamic party), Communist, and other labels that testified to Saddam’s ruthless repression of all independent political activity. New files continued to come in by the thousands from all over Iraq; the association was planning on moving to the former military intelligence headquarters.

A random file revealed that Sadiq Hamudi Salih, born in 1960, was a soldier accused of joining the Da’wa party in 1981 and criticizing the regime. In 1984 he was sentenced to five years in prison. Another file revealed that when authorities could not find Madhkur Salim Mishish they executed his relatives in 1984. Yet another file documented the mass execution of 16 people.

Saad Muhammad was a 39-year-old volunteer at the association responsible for gathering information. He was imprisoned for four years for criticizing Saddam. He showed me a Procrustean British-made traction couch that they found in the general security headquarters, and demonstrated its use during interrogations: to stretch victims until their bodies broke and tore. He also showed me a meat grinder for humans that they had found.

I came upon my own trove of records one day, as I was walking through Baghdad’s streets. In the poor neighborhood of Betawin, I stumbled into an abandoned police station, housing the Saadun general security directory office on its second floor. It was clear that a systematic attempt had been made to destroy the documents on the second floor, presumably by the minor intelligence officials who had worked in it. I found two overturned document shredders, and the thin strings that had borne the bureaucratic record of various horrors were strewn about the floor along with broken glass and ashes. Most file cabinets and their contents had been thrown into a few rooms that were torched, and all that remained in the file drawers were ashes. A local Christian boy, 12 years old and illiterate, brought sacks for me to load files into. Those documents that were salvageable bore witness to the mundane daily operations of a dictatorship’s local security station over the previous years, right up to the final days in March 2003 before the war.

They included:

The 2001 duties of security officers, files recording people changing their locations of residence, information from a snitch about a stolen antique sword and drug deals, inquiries from family members about disappeared or arrested people and the responses that no information was available about them, lists of people belonging to enemy or sectarian organizations, lists of people who had criticized Saddam, a report about a Da’wa party member who had killed a Baath party official, lists of Shias making, importing or selling religious tapes, lists of people under surveillance, reports on people observing religious ceremonies, a file about a rich man arrested in the company of several young girls, information on participants in the 1991 Shia uprising, weekly orders to spread pro-regime rumors and combat anti-regime rumors, lists of executed political prisoners and the reasons why they were executed, information on bank employees in Baghdad, a report about the Pakistani minister of health visiting a mosque in Baghdad, lists of security monitors in schools, surveillance orders for political and religious suspects, lists of local barbers, list of collaborators, lists of all the Friday sermons from Baghdad mosques in organized charts, each chart bearing the name of the mosque, the date of the prayer, the name of the cleric, the subject of the speech, the numbers and ages of the attendees, the number of women praying, whether it was a Sunni or Shia mosque, whether the cleric praised Saddam, and the name of the spy, lists of spies in mosques and churches, names of applicants to study in the Islamic university, reports on people who had tried to leave Iraq illegally, orders for the families of executed prisoners to come pick up the corpses, a report about a Wahhabi Muslim arrested for placing a bomb in a liquor store, names of men who had walked in the pilgrimage to Karbala (some of whom were accused of murder as a result), a report about a man accused of impersonating an intelligence officer, orders to spread rumors that Iraq could defeat the U.S. and would attack Israel and liberate Palestine, that the Iraqi gifts to Palestinians raised their morale and caused the Israeli prime minister’s government to fall, that POWs from Iran were returning, that supermarkets would soon be open, that the government would let people retain the temporary homes they were assigned, that the euro would become the international currency and not the dollar, a report on a woman arrested because her son had deserted the military, a list of people accused of belonging to a group seeking to avenge the murder of Shia leader Muhammad Sadiq Sadr, a report about a man accused of breaking a picture of Saddam Hussein, an order to use the term “American administration” instead of “American government,” and a memo to all branches about the U.S. information war against Iraq.

One dense folder contained numerous official security service memos about the arrest of Abad Ali Safai Ahmad, who was accused of insulting Saddam and the Baath Party. According to the files Ahmad was a taxi driver, born in 1975, who lived in the Shia slums then known as Saddam City (now Sadr City). He was a veteran of the war against Iran, and one of his brothers had been killed in that war.

On July 4, 2002, the leadership of the Batal al Tahrir, or “Heroes of Liberation,” section of the Al Aqsa group office of the Baath Party, ordered the arrest of Ahmad for his “assault on the person of the master and leader the President, may Allah bless and protect him,” and his detention for “a reasonable period” according to section 225q.aa.

Basher Aziz al Tamimi, Ahmad’s neighbor, a Baath Party member from the al Aqsa branch and also a taxi driver, testified against him. Tamimi encountered a very drunk Ahmad on the night of July 3. According to Tamimi, Ahmad suggested to him that they sell a privately owned car but Tamimi reminded him that there was a law against this proposed activity because it was a 1978 model. Al Tamimi then testified that Ahmad cursed Saddam, saying, “Saddam’s sister’s pussy over this law!” In Arabic referring to the vagina of a man’s female relatives is a terrible insult. Tamimi asked Ahmad why he was attacking the president when he knew that Tamimi was a member of the Baath Party. “Your sister’s pussy and the Baath Party’s sister’s pussy!” Ahmad replied, according to Tamimi. Tamimi then testified that “We had a fist fight and I reported the case to my supervisor Saad Khalaf and he requested I file a written report and then we went to Shahab because he is responsible for the branch security.”

The men organized a group to go to Ahmad’s house. Tamimi testified that when they arrived Ahmad hit him and threatened him, saying, “I will shave your mustache and the Baath Party’s mustache.” In Iraq a mustache is considered a symbol of manhood and honor, and threatening to shave a man’s mustache is an insult. A man can also take an oath, swearing by his mustache, and if he has been humiliated, or if his sister has, for example, he can shave his mustache and refuse to grow it until his honor has been restored and he is once more “a man.”

Another witness testifying at the security investigation court against Ahmad was Shehab Hamad Jabar al Shebli, a retired officer born in 1952 and also living in Saddam City. “I am a Baathi with the rank of section leader and a member of the Al Aqsa branch,” he began, continuing that on the night in question, at 1:30 a.m., he was met by Tamimi and another Baath Party member, who informed him that the accused had “assaulted the president the master and leader himself, Allah bless him and protect him.” They formed a committee and went to Ahmad’s house, where he angrily hit Tamimi and threatened to shave Tamimi’s mustache and that of the Baath Party. “Which caused me to hit him and bring him to committee center and I did not hear him attack the personality of the master leader the president, Allah bless him and protect him, and should I have heard him assault him I would have killed him and this is my testimony.” Other witnesses also testified in support of Ahmad’s accusers.

In his testimony Ahmad explained that “I had consumed alcoholic drink and I did not assault the person of the master and the leader president, Allah bless him and keep him.” Ahmad claimed he had witnesses who supported his side of the story. He admitted that “the same night an individual party committee came to my house to arrest me” including Tamimi, “and as I was in a bad temper I hit him and as he does not have a mustache I said to him I shave yours and the party’s mustache and I did not mean to direct the assault on the party in my words and as I mentioned I was under the influence of alcohol and was drunk and in a bad temper for I had a brother who was martyred in the great battle of Qadisyat Saddam his name was Abad al Radha and he died in 1986 and I seek the forgiveness and this is my testimony.” Ahmad claimed that Tamimi owed him 10,000 dinars and when he had asked for it back they got into an argument.

Ahmad was jailed but released in an amnesty granted two months later.

Another file I found documented the arrest of a traditional healer who was accused of being a witch. I tracked down the accused witch, Aliya Jasem, who lived in the village of Huseiniya, north of Baghdad. Huseiniya’s own inhabitants did not know the names of their own streets. Amid sewage- and waste-filled unpaved roads, where half-naked toddlers played, I finally found Aliya’s modest house. Her husband, Sadiq Naji Muhamad, was a tailor in Baghdad. They had four children. Sadiq had been a prisoner of war in Iran for nine years. He told me that Shia prisoners were singled out for special punishment by the Iranian guards who viewed them as traitors fighting for Sunnis. He was held in the Hashmetiya prison in Tehran where he saw many fellow prisoners killed or tortured.

As an unrelated male I could not meet Aliya; I could only catch a glimpse of her silhouette or the end of her dress, hear her voice as she spoke with her husband and hear her moving about in the kitchen. Sadiq related their shared story. She was a fortuneteller, psychic and traditional healer. Many Iraqi Shias believe that descendents of the prophet Muhammad, such as Aliya, can treat the spirit using the Quran. Aliya was one such descendant. She treated spiritual ailments such as depression. If a woman is expelled from her husband’s family’s home Aliya could treat her and she would be taken back. If a dog attacked a child she opened and closed the Quran three times in the child’s face in order to cure it. She could cure women who were not wanted as wives. She placed special stones in front of the afflicted woman’s house and washed her, reading from the Quran and the sayings of Imam Ali, Muhamad’s nephew and a key figure for Shias; this helped the woman find a husband. Sadiq proudly related that Aliya could not read or write but despite that she could know everything about a person by looking at their face.

When she was a child Aliya’s legs were paralyzed. Her family took her to a Shia shrine near Hilla since no doctor could treat her. Sadiq explained that at the shrine she was able to stand on her own feet and walk and since then she had special powers. “There are two types of magic,” Sadiq said, “the devil’s magic, practiced by some sects in Iraq, but which is against the Quran, and merciful magic, which can combat the devil’s magic and which she practiced. The book on magic is called the talasim.”

Aliya was paid for her services, but it was very little. This traditional healing is very common in Iraq and since every woman in the neighborhood knew about her (she only treated women), her abilities spread through word of mouth. Sadiq maintained that most women in his wife’s field were also security agents or collaborators. The security service wanted Aliya to work with them because she had access to every woman in the city and could discover the secrets of each home, such as who was against Saddam and who was involved in illegal political activity. She refused to be an agent, so they accused her of having an anti-Saddam political group in her home. Sadiq said that the mayor was a security agent and Baath Party official.

On Aug. 10, 2002, Aliya was arrested by the Iraqi security forces led by an officer named Bahar. She was found guilty of witchcraft and spent two months in jail. The order to arrest her came from the national security directorate. The documents said she was released due to her husband’s request. He wrote a letter to the security service that she had only been using special spiritual techniques to cure ailments of the soul, and only for women, using the Quran and only in the neighborhood or to female relatives. He asked for another chance, promising that she would never do it again. He also mentioned that he was a POW in Iran and he chose to return to Iraq, unlike other Shias who joined Iranian-sponsored anti-Saddam militias.

Although Aliya was sentenced to six months she was released after 70 days from the Rashas women’s prison (she was transferred from the al Rusufa prison) in a general amnesty. When she was arrested Sadiq followed the police to inquire why but they pushed him away and ordered him to leave. Aliya was beaten in the police station.

Sadiq was still bitter. “She is a good wife and they put her in the same prison with prostitutes,” he said. “She was so traumatized she has ceased performing her magic since.”

After her release Aliya went to the tomb of Abbas, an important Shia shrine, and said, “If I am really your relative prove it by destroying Saddam and all his men within a year.” Six months later his government fell. Sadiq explained that “God answered the prayers of those who had suffered.”

Thinking back on these notes, which remained in my notebooks for years, takes me back to the question I started with. Was it all worth it? Was it better to leave Saddam in power? Are Iraqis better or worse off than they were before the American war?

I never know what to say when asked this question. How do you compare different kinds of terror?

Those spared Saddam’s prisons and executioners may be better off, though they have not been spared the American prisons, or attacks, or the resistance’s bombs, or the death squads of the civil war. The Kurds are certainly better off, on their way to independence, benefiting from their relative stability and improved economy. The rest of Iraq? In many ways, things are worse. Under Saddam the violence came from one source, the regime. Now it has been democratically distributed. Death can come from anywhere, at all times, no matter who you are. You can be killed for crossing the street, for going to the market, for driving your car, for having the wrong name, for being in your house, for being a Sunni, for being a Shia, for being a woman. The American military can kill you in an operation, you can be arrested by militias and disappear in Iraq’s new secret prisons, now run by Shias, or you can be kidnapped by the resistance, or by criminal gangs.

Americans cannot simply observe the horror of Iraq and shake their heads in wonder, as if it were Rwanda and they had no role. America is responsible for the new chaos in Iraq, which began following the invasion and the botched and brutal occupation. Iraq’s people continue to suffer under the American occupation and civil war, just as they did under the American-imposed sanctions and bombings before the war, and just as they did under the years of dictatorship. Once more they are mere victims of powers they cannot control. Saddam is out and the Americans are in, but Iraq is still a republic of fear.

This is not the first time my words have landed me in trouble. I have been challenged many times on my support of resistance movements and my support of engaging with America’s enemies, and I have never and will never apologize for those stances. I continue to apologize for this comment because it in no way reflects the way I feel about women or violence. Sexual assault is never funny, and it is a terrible crime. I have apologized to Ms. Logan and her family, and to victims of sexual violence everywhere.

So why did I write it? It was a disgusting comment born from dark humor I have developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon — and a need to provoke people. I have a few think tank friends on Twitter, and we often banter about the morality of WikiLeaks, counterinsurgency and other issues. When I first heard the news about Logan, I assumed she was roughed up like every other journalist — which is still bad — but I was jokingly trying to provoke one of my think tank friends on Twitter, thoughtlessly, of course, and terribly insensitively. Stupidly, I didn’t think the banter between myself and a couple of other guys would amount to anything.

Now, Twitter is no place for nuance, which is why I should have stuck to long-form journalism. And I have been frustrated by the ideological opportunists who have used this ordeal for their personal gain. People whose words have helped create and justify war and genocide are now jumping onto this issue to attack me for my previous journalism (which, naturally, I stand by). People like Jeffrey Goldberg, who has blood on his hands, and now acts like he’s never heard of me, jump in and use the disgusting situation of Logan’s assault as a lever against a longtime rival. Others include Michael Totten, Lee Smith and Jim Geraghty of the National Review, who led the crusade against me. I used a horrible situation as a way to provoke some friends. They are using it to further their careers.

So, given the opportunity here for some nuance, I feel I should explain the point I really was trying to make. Had Logan been a non-white, non-famous journalist, this story would have never made it to the news. Ahmed Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist, was killed in cold blood and nobody ever heard of him. Dozens of other women were harassed and nobody will ever know their names. Credible accounts indicate that the assaults on women took place largely on the Friday of the victory celebration, when millions of non-demonstrators joined the party. Countless women (Egyptian and foreign, journalists and others) have reported being harassed and assaulted in Tahrir Square that Friday, mostly, it seems, by non-revolutionaries. (This harassment was a preexisting problem that Egyptian women have been increasingly complaining about.)

So why all the focus on Logan? The U.S. media did not care when Egyptian journalists (or any other Egyptian) were being jailed. Only when pretty white people showed up did Egypt really start to matter, and then, they were preoccupied with the scary Muslim Brotherhood possibly taking over, or what would happen to poor Israel now that there was a “threat” of democracy in Egypt.

This is why I wrote in a Twitter that I was already rolling my eyes. Even before we knew what happened to her, I knew how to anticipate the media response in the United States. So Logan and Anderson Cooper have become the story, instead of the thousands of Egyptians who have far more compelling stories.

Meanwhile, I have not seen any condemnation of the pure hatred, racism and vitriol that I’ve seen spewed all over the Internet in response to the Logan story. I’ve seen Arabs, Muslims and Egyptians called animals and pigs in tens of websites and, right under the Logan stories, read vile rhetoric about them that would never be acceptable if used against any other group.

I really have been outraged by Logan’s stories in the past, which I feel have defended American imperial adventures that cost the lives of many thousands of people in the Middle East, glorified American special forces even while they were killing innocent Afghans, and praised Gen. Stanley McChrystal, while condemning her own colleague, Michael Hastings, of Rolling Stone (because he hadn’t served his country, she said). My resentment of Logan was because I felt she was a terrible journalist who supported wars that I had covered.

But joking about her assault betrayed the very principles that led me to condemn her in the first place. And her destructive reporting has nothing to do with the crime she suffered, nothing at all. I point it out now only to explain my thinking, not to justify or defend the hurt I caused.

Still, right-wing American pundits called for Julian Assange to be assassinated, and it’s perfectly acceptable to proudly support wars that kill thousands of innocent people. Racist right-wing pundits can say whatever they want on serious platforms, Ann Coulter can call for more journalists to be jailed in Egypt at CPAC (and be met with applause) but I made a callous joke on Twitter, a medium far less serious (I thought), and an entire mob turns on me. It’s hard not to be cynical about many of the sanctimonious responses I have received. Especially when they come from people who support every kind of American war (or Israeli war), tolerate racism against Arabs and Muslims, and — while focusing on the plight of celebrities — ignore outrages like our scorched-earth policies in Kandahar. The attacks have aimed at ending my career, but my career will endure because my work stands on its own.

I’m baffled by the fact that 1,000 new people started to follow me on Twitter. What do they expect to read? It’s a bizarre, voyeuristic Internet culture and everybody in the mob is looking to get in on the next fight first, to be at the center of the thing that’s happening, even if there’s nothing really there. Which might explain the thousands of stupid e-mails and tweets I have received from the mob wanting to get a punch in. But given that I have been condemned for seeming to condone sexual assault, it’s surprising how many hundreds (no exaggeration) of people have e-mailed me wishing that I or people close to me will be sexually assaulted.

I also don’t think this would have become such a story if I were not a leftist opponent of American wars (even the Washington Post stressed my “pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab political views”) and I have a hard time taking a lot of the sanctimonious condemnation from right-wingers very seriously, given what right-wing pundits say on a daily basis. But every creep I skewered or outraged in public now has the chance at a cheap revenge. Unfortunately, what I said in glib frustration didn’t really damage the culture I was targeting, it just damaged my allies, my friends and the causes I struggle for.

There’s probably some larger lesson about social media to be drawn here, and how its immediacy can be great in its power to connect us, but also a liability because something blurted out and not meant to be serious acquires a greater power. Then, an offensive joke can be seen as an ideological manifesto, gallows humor can be seen as a serious support for sexual assault. I only wish this had been apparent to me before I hit enter.

I hope that one day people will believe me when I say that I did not mean it and that it does not reflect who I am. I hope that people will take time to read my work and understand that I have spent my career taking a lot of heat for defending victims of all kinds, not just Arabs and Muslims. And I hope Ms. Logan and other victims of sexual violence will one day forgive me for my terrible mistake.

Nir Rosen is a freelance writer, photographer and filmmaker who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. He is the author of “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.”

But what sets Muqtada apart from the other Shiite leaders — and makes him a potentially crucial, if supremely unlikely, ally for the United States — is his close ties to the Sunni insurgents. With sectarian tensions in Iraq and the region increasing, Muqtada may be the only Shiite leader in Iraq who can reach out to Sunnis, who see him as “the good Shia.” His Mahdi army fought the American occupiers, establishing street cred with the Sunni resistance. Much of Muqtada’s appeal is his fervent nationalism. Unlike the leadership of Dawa or the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Muqtada was not in exile and, like his father, has condemned foreign-born clerics based in Iraq.

On the crucial issues that divide Shiite and Sunni, Muqtada sides with the Sunnis. He opposes federalism, which he believes will lead to the breakup of Iraq, and supports amending the constitution. SCIRI and the other main Shiite party, Dawa, support federalism and refuse to amend the constitution. For Sunnis, federalism means the loss not just of the old Iraq, which they dominated, but also of oil revenue, and they are determined to resist it. Muqtada is their only Shiite ally. Inexperienced in foreign affairs and barely experienced in politics, Muqtada may nonetheless be the only figure capable of halting Iraq’s steady descent into a civil war that could ignite the entire region.

Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert on Iraq’s Shiites, says, “Muqtada is indeed now in a position to form a link between fundamentalist Sunnis and hard line Shias, to the extent that they do have some goals in common. [American ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad is now supporting a better deal for the Sunni Arabs and is pushing for a national unity government into which the Shias incorporate them, so he is a de facto potential ally of Muqtada, though neither he nor Muqtada will admit it.”

Muqtada is an unlikely ally for the United States. Before joining the Shiite coalition, Muqtada insisted that other Iraqi politicians agree to his “Code of Honor,” which sets a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, legitimizes resistance if the U.S. stays, and rejects any relationship with Israel. Muqtada also refused to work with more secular former Baathist parties, calling the participation of U.S. favorite Ayad Allawi in particular a red line that would force him to back out. Allawi and his party were hated by Muqtada’s men both for having former Baathists in their ranks and for Allawi’s asking the Americans to battle Muqtada in the spring and summer of 2004.

In recent weeks, Muqtada burnished his credentials with both the Sunni and Shiite establishments when he visited first Saudi Arabia, then Iran — where he warned the United States that if it attacked Iran, he would send his forces into the field. His meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abullah proved he is the only Shiite leader in Iraq that Sunnis can tolerate; his trip to Iran cemented his ties with the Shiite clerical elite and boosted his regional stature as an ideological foe of the United States and Israel.

Muqtada’s legislative triumph makes him legitimate, no longer an outsider. Crucially, his presence gives Sunnis hope that he will succeed in defying SCIRI by blocking federalism and modifying the constitution. It also complicates SCIRI’s coalition with the Kurds. The hypernationalist Muqtada and his followers are fierce enemies of the Kurds, condemning their autonomy and clashing with them in the north, where many Shiite Turkmens are aligned with Muqtada.

Muqtada is far from impressive in person. His unpolished speech and youth (it has been widely speculated that he is younger than his putative age of about 32) have led American officials to consistently underestimate him. But Muqtada has drawn on his impeccable family pedigree and his fiery anti-Americanism to build vast popular support — and he has proved much more clever than his enemies expected.

I first met Muqtada in May 2003 in his barani, or office, in a Najaf alley, across a shop where his and his father’s sermons were sold on CD and one could buy watches with the Sadr family members depicted on the face. Unlike other clerics in Najaf, who speak classical Arabic, Muqtada speaks in a strong colloquial slang. He seemed cocky. He disparaged Shiite exile leaders who had been based in Iran and had not suffered with the Iraqis, singling out the SCIRI for particular disdain. Muqtada expressed only contempt for the Americans who had so recently rid his people of Saddam, and resentment of Iran, which had done nothing to help Iraq’s Shiites. “I am not afraid,” he said, “I wish to be a martyr and I don’t fear death.” I was struck by how awkward Muqtada looked and how ill-experienced he was for a man so popular that throughout Shiite neighborhoods he was known only by his first name, a tribute no other Iraqi leader received. I wondered, as I do to this day, if there was some other brain behind his operation. His young, unctuous associates seemed too smug, as if they already knew Iraq was theirs.

Muqtada al-Sadr derives his power from his family connections. He is the scion of the revolutionary Sadr family, one of the most illustrious religious names in Iraq. His great-uncle, Muhammad Bakr Sadr, was the most important Shiite theologian of the 20th century, writing about economics, politics and philosophy as well. Bakr Sadr led the Dawa Party, an underground movement whose members were decimated by the Baath Party. In 1980, after Bakr Sadr declared Baath Party membership forbidden, he was arrested with his sister, forced to watch her raped and executed, and then executed himself by having nails driven into his head. He became known as the First Martyr.

Bakr Sadr’s nephew (and Muqtada’s father), Ayatollah Muhamad Sadiq Sadr, envisioned himself as the wali al am, or general leader, of the clergy, a position above all others, including the top clerics in Iran. He aspired to lead world Shiism and head an Islamic government in Iraq. In 1998, when Saddam Hussein relaxed restrictions on the Friday khutba, or sermon, Sadiq Sadr began preaching at the Kufa mosque outside Najaf. His 47 very influential sermons reached all Iraqi Shiites. He was particularly obsessed with the coming of the Mahdi, or Shiite messiah, the 12th leader of the Shiite community who disappeared into an occult realm and whose return is eagerly awaited by Shiites.

Muhamad Sadiq Sadr may have looked like an avuncular Santa Claus, but he regularly damned as infidels those who disagreed with him, and hung up lists of the damned in his office. (Many on the lists were accused of homosexuality.) Sadr outraged the Shiite establishment in Najaf’s hawza, or seminary, by denouncing the other leading ayatollahs who were not of Iraqi origin. Saddam’s regime promoted Sadr as a homegrown alternative to non-Iraqi clerics, especially those originating from Iran. In 1999 Muhamad Sadiq Sadr became the Second Martyr after he and two of his sons were killed when their car was riddled with bullets. Although Shiites blamed it on the regime, it is likely that rival clerics in the hawza were responsible for the assassination.

Muqtada moved quickly to establish his power base after Saddam fell. Posters of the First and Second Sadr martyrs appeared throughout Iraq’s Shiite areas, symbolizing the new order. The downtrodden masses of Iraq, the Shiite “mustad’afeen,” as the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iraq had called them, were in power for the first time since the 7th century, when the Sunnis had begun ruling over them. Muqtada’s father, the Second Martyr, had built an impressive network of mosques and social services around the country, controlled by his former students, and Muqtada capitalized on this network, dispatching young clerics around the country to seize mosques, hospitals, clinics, and looted goods, and to provide security and social services. His men soon gained control of the Baghdad slums known as Saddam City, where up to 3 million Shiites lived. Built in the ’50s to house Shiite migrants from the south, it was originally called Madinat Athawra, or Revolution City, and was a bastion of the Iraq Communist Party. Signs and graffiti proclaimed Saddam City’s new name: Sadr City. (Part of the reason for Muqtada’s support for a centralized Iraq may be because he has so much support in Baghdad.)

There was a nearly messianic euphoria among Iraq’s Shiites, many of whom viewed the Mahdi’s arrival as imminent. Among Muqtada Sadr’s followers it was common to hear the view that the U.S. Army had come to kill the Mahdi, but that the Mahdi would kill all the Americans — and all the Jews too, for good measure.

The Shiite leadership followed the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who counseled the faithful to bide their time and not resist the American occupation. But Muqtada remained defiant. Rejected for a post in the Iraqi Governing Council established by American proconsul Paul Bremer, he seized the role of spoiler, condemning the occupation and the IGC and establishing his Mahdi army, allegedly to protect Shiites. Muqtada became a rallying point for Iraqi nationalism. In August 2003, when an American helicopter tried to remove a Shiite flag in Sadr City, enraged followers of Muqtada rioted, convinced that America was the enemy of Iraq and Islam.

From the start, Muqtada has supported the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency, with the exception of the foreign Arab-dominated Zarqawi movement that finds Shiites anathema. As the insurgency spread, Muqtada established a close working relationship with radical Sunni movements, especially the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a neo-Baathist movement of Sunni clerics. The AMS controlled one of Iraq’s most important indigenous resistance groups, the 1920 Revolution Battalions, named for the rebellion against the British occupation, and AMS scholars routinely sermonized in support of the resistance. Muqtada’s clerics held joint prayer sessions with them, and in the fateful spring of 2004, when Fallujah rose up against the Americans, followed by an uprising of Shiites in the south, Shiite followers of Muqtada helped their Sunni brethren and benefited from aid and arms sent at the behest of the AMS.

Muqtada fought the Americans once more in the summer of 2004. Though American forces swore to arrest or kill him, Muqtada survived and even indirectly fielded candidates in the January 2005 elections. They won seats in both the national and provincial governments and even had two ministers in the Cabinet.

These battles were invaluable in establishing Muqtada’s militant and patriotic credibility, particularly among Sunnis. Muqtada’s followers boast that “the two intifadas” they have fought against the Americans prove that they are true Iraqi nationalists who refuse to accept occupation, unlike the two other leading Shiite movements, SCIRI and Dawa. In addition, Muqtada’s movement has drawn many former Baathists into its ranks, as well as Shiites who served in Saddam’s dreaded security and intelligence services. And he has been a fierce critic of Iran, warning of Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. All these factors make Muqtada acceptable to Sunnis who fear and hate the rest of the Shiite establishment.

Sunnis increasingly view all Shiites as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shiites are the majority or that Shiites had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis are the primary victims of American military aggression, and they view Shiites as collaborators with the occupation.

And Sunni antagonism towards Shiites has been fed by an increasingly violent series of targeted killings of insurgent leaders. In the fall, Sunni leaders accused SCIRI’s Badr militia of infiltrating the Ministry of Interior and sending out uniformed death squads to assassinate former Baathists and Sunni clerics. (In fact, Muqtada’s militia, the Mahdi army, also sends out death squads to assassinate Sunnis it deems deserving of death, but this fact is not widely known.) The existence of secret prisons revealed that the SCIRI-dominated Ministry of Interior had learned well from America’s prisons in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

For their part, Shiites tend to view Sunnis as Baathists or Wahhabis, but until last year — despite suffering an endless onslaught of terror attacks meant to provoke a civil war — they showed restraint. But last year the situation grew more ominous. Politics became increasingly sectarian — and bloody. Tit-for-tat killings began: After a Shiite cleric was assassinated, a Sunni cleric would turn up dead the following morning. Threats and bombings drove Shiites from Sunni neighborhoods.

The Sunni-Shiite discord unleashed by the U.S. invasion is not confined to Iraq. Muqtada’s trip to Saudi Arabia took place against a backdrop of rising sectarian tensions throughout the region. Sunnis make up the majority in every Arab state except Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon; in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in particular, they feel threatened by the Shiite renaissance in Iraq. In December 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shiites have demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who cross into Iraq and commit atrocities against Shiite civilians.

These tensions have spilled over into acrimony between Iraqi and Saudi officials. In September, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. In response Bayan Jabr, Iraq’s interior minister — and the former commander of the Badr Corps, SCIRI’s militia — called the Saudi foreign minister a “Bedouin riding a camel” and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship.

In Saudi Arabia, home of Wahabi Islam, Shiites are known as “rafida,” which means “rejectionists.” A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shiites are outside Islam, and to Shiites it is the equivalent of being called “nigger.” This is the same word that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq, uses to describe Shiites, as do Sunni radicals in the region. The ascension of King Abdullah, who has taken a more moderate stance on the Shiites, is a positive development. But Saudi Arabia’s 2 million Shiites have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shiite “rafida” collaborators.

In this context, Muqtada’s trip to Saudi Arabia was at least a small step in building a regional bridge between Sunnis and Shiites.

As Iraqis try to form a government, it is not yet clear whether Muqtada will succeed in persuading his fellow Shiites to compromise on key issues like federalism and the constitution. Iraq’s Shiites are triumphant, knowing that Iraq is now theirs and cannot be taken away from them except by the Americans. There is no threat of Sunnis retaking the country, because they had never taken it before; they had been given it — first by the Ottomans and then by the British. SCIRI sees no need for compromise. It plans to forcefully impose a new order on Iraq, one that directly clashes with Sunni aspirations and reinforces all their fears.

The one figure opposing SCIRI’s maximalist demands is Muqtada. Should he win out over SCIRI in a battle for influence, we might see a majority in the Assembly calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq, and we would also see support for a stricter imposition of Islamic law as well as increased tension with the Kurds. The Americans who had once called for his arrest or death would be forced to deal with their former enemy, though he too would now be restrained by his own political participation.

It is a priceless irony that Muqtada Sadr — the poorly educated, inarticulate, thuggish and violently anti-American young cleric — may be the one man who can allow America to get out of Iraq without the roof caving in after them.

But like the American colonists in the 18th century, Iraqis today are grumbling about their invisible ruler, U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer III, who until this week had rejected representation for them, declaring them not mature enough to decide their own fate. Iraqis have had three unelected regimes in three months — Saddam was replaced by the bucolic retired Gen. Jay Garner, who was in turn replaced by the urbane Bremer. Meanwhile Gen. Tommy Franks and President George W. Bush issue edicts that affect Iraqis’ daily lives and Arnold Schwarzenegger visits the troops but doesn’t greet his local fans. Even the name of the government has changed three times before settling, for now, on Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In his “freedom message to the Iraqi people,” Gen. Franks, then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, announced that the U.S. and the U.K. “have come as liberators, not occupiers,” adding that they have come “to enforce U.N. resolutions requiring the destruction of weapons of mass destruction” (that so far do not seem to exist). Iraqis assumed a liberator would bring liberty, not chaos, anarchy and insecurity.

The most common refrain one hears from Iraqis these days is: “They came as liberators and now they are occupiers.” The significance of the liberation vs. occupation debate can get lost in translation here, but its immense political implications were evident in a June 2 meeting, hosted by the Coalition Provisional Authority, for nearly 300 tribal leaders of all religions and ethnic groups. Hume Horan, a political advisor to Bremer, also was present. Horan, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and fluent Arabic speaker, addressed the audience in Arabic about the coalition’s efforts and its need for Iraqi support.

After Horan finished speaking, Sheik Munther Abood from Amarra thanked President Bush for removing the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein and stated that he had seen the mass graves full of dead Shias in the south and was firmly opposed to Saddam. He then asked Horan if the coalition forces in Iraq were liberators or occupiers. Horan responded that they were “somewhere in between occupier and liberator.”

This was not well received by the audience. Sheik Abood stated that if America was a liberator, then the coalition forces were welcome indefinitely as guests, but that if they were occupiers, then he and his descendants would “die resisting” them. This met with energetic applause from the audience. Several other sheiks echoed the same sentiment. Then the meeting deteriorated and a third of the audience stood up and walked out, despite efforts by Horan and other organizers to encourage them to stay. At which point the meeting ended. It was not a public relations success.

Lawyers working for the Coalition Provisional Authority readily acknowledge that the American presence is an occupation and it is their task to apply international law to what they perceive as a legal occupation and the obligations resulting from it. “There is no liberation law,” said one colonel, only “occupation law.” International law does not recognize the concept of liberator, only occupier, and the holder of this status assumes certain responsibilities. A major working in civil affairs offers a nuanced rationalization: “It’s a legal occupation, but a moral liberation.”

For Americans, “occupation” conjures images of occupied Germany or Japan and the repair of damaged societies. In Arabic, “tahrir,” or “liberation,” and “ihtilal,” or “occupation,” have much greater moral and emotional significance. “Ihtilal” means the Roman Catholic crusaders who slaughtered Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians, it means the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the 13th century, it means the British imperialists who divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire with the French, and it means the Israelis who oppressed southern Lebanon and imposed their will brutally on the Palestinians.

“We removed Saddam and we brought one thing to the people, the freedom to talk,” said a dejected staff sergeant with the Free Iraqi Forces, Iraqi exiles who volunteered to return to Iraq with the American forces. His wife accuses him of being an occupier when he calls her back in America. “We warned them,” he says of the Americans, “but they didn’t listen. They are turning a thousand friends into enemies every day.”

The foreign troops have become an onerous presence, as if the burden of Saddam was removed only to be replaced by a new burden. Iraqis now have to suffer the numerous intrusive checkpoints, the traffic jams they cause, the many roadblocks, the tanks, the lines for gasoline. They are awakened by the rumbling of tanks through streets, or the sounds of gunfire. Many Iraqis wonder what are these words “fuck” and “shit” that Americans use all the time. Frustrated young soldiers point their machine guns at grandmothers and sometimes tease unarmed Iraqi youths about how easily they could kill them.

Iraqis are lost and confused before the American juggernaut. There used to be ministries, ways of getting things done; now they have to march through long paths carved out with barbed wire and stand in the sun, with gun barrels facing them, as they are searched, patted down, questioned, their I.D.s declared unsuitable, told they cannot be helped, sent elsewhere. Tempers are lost; Americans scream in English and Iraqis scream back in Arabic, neither understanding the other. American soldiers do not sympathize with the inconvenience. “We stand in the sun all day,” said one soldier, looking at hundreds of Iraqi men standing or squatting, and waiting.

They continue waiting at night, without electricity, living in darkness by gas lanterns, listening to the sounds of gunfire all night, suffering from heat without air conditioning, sleeping outside to escape the saunas in their homes, sitting on the curbs or standing in clusters, living in boredom, fear, frustration and futility. There is no security. Saddam’s regime had a monopoly on violence. It was possible to accommodate oneself to life under Saddam, and to live without arousing the state’s ire or incurring its wrath. The present violence is random, collaboration with it impossible.

Meanwhile, coalition soldiers live removed from Iraqis, hiding in palaces that once belonged to Saddam. They are increasingly vulnerable and nervous after an epidemic of successful attacks on Americans, and the high security that accompanied the first weeks after the war is being restored. Some attackers are indeed the lingering remnants of Saddam’s regime. Nihilistically they shoot power stations with rocket-propelled grenades and blow up water pipes, damaging Iraqi communities for the sake of propaganda.

Two frustrated U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say that many of those who attack Americans are not former Republican Guards or members of Fedayeen Saddam or the Baath Party, as has been widely assumed, but instead are men who opposed Saddam and welcomed the Americans. Suffering wounded pride and humiliation from the treatment they receive from U.S. military personnel, they need to restore their self-esteem. It is a view repeatedly reinforced during conversations with Iraqis themselves. They feel shame for their country’s quick capitulation after predictions of last stands and blood baths and boasts that American soldiers would not be able to deal with the heat. These successful attacks demonstrate their virility and the American vulnerability and gratify most Iraqis subconsciously, as evidenced by how fast detailed and accurate rumors of the attacks spread throughout the country.

Some American soldiers wonder why anybody would want to attack them, since they are, in the end, liberators. Others are cynical and question why they were sent to Iraq at all. One enlisted Marine wanted to know what it was like back home during the war, if Americans supported them, and if they knew why the war had been fought. When asked why he thought he was in Iraq, he responded: “It’s obvious — for oil. The first thing we did was secure the oil field in Basra.” And then he scoffed: “Americans are blind! There were no weapons of mass destruction. We barely even took any fire.” Other soldiers complain that they were sent to do a job they were not trained for. How long will their patience last?

Most Iraqi clerics have told their congregations to be patient, that the time is not right to attack Americans and they should give them six months or a year to fulfill their promises. And perhaps such patience will pay off. Bremer in May had rejected earlier plans to give substantial power to an Iraqi provisional government. But in an apparent concession to Iraqi pressure, Bremer has announced that a temporary governing council will be established later this month, and Iraqi political leaders agreed this week to join it.

Still, the clerics say, if the Americans fail, or if they remain in Iraq too long, it is legitimate to attack them. “All good people of the world reject foreign occupation,” Imam Muayad, the leader of Iraq’s most important Sunni mosque, said last Saturday. “Whether they are Muslim or not. Americans rejected British imperialism, so why do they deny other people the right to do what they did? We as Muslims reject any foreign occupation because Muslims do not recognize slavery to anyone but God.”