Fallujah
By Jonathan Miles
In the pre-dawn hours of Easter Sunday I paced back and forth along the roadway in Amman, Jordan, near the GMC Suburbans which carry passengers into Iraq. Their drivers, normally desperate for business, had drawn back when asked if they could take me, an American citizen, into Iraq on this day. “Turn around,” one said. Finally another offered that he could take me as far as the outskirts of Fallujah, at double the normal price.
One of the families we’d helped with heart surgery was in Fallujah, and I longed to somehow mediate as events in their city threatened to destroy the relationship between Iraqis and the outsiders who’d come to help them. So many hopes for God’s grace to touch the Iraqi people seemed to be in the balance.
How did it come to this in Iraq? That same morning a Washington Post reporter would witness a telling encounter in Baghdad between American officer Peter Mansoor and tribal leaders.
"I would remind you that the coalition did not start this latest
round of violence."
In the back, an Iraqi man rose to differ.
"The Iraqis started the violence?" he said. "This is not
the truth. The demonstrations were peaceful."
Demonstrations? Mansoor was not talking about demonstrations. As far as
the U.S.-led forces are concerned, the violence in Iraq resumed at 5 p.m.
the previous Sunday, April 4, when Sadr's Mahdi Army militiamen ambushed
a U.S. patrol in Sadr City, the squalid Shiite slum on Baghdad's eastern
side.
"I know exactly where it happened in Sadr City," Mansoor said.
"On the northern end. I can show you on a map.
"By the way," he said. "We lost six soldiers that day."
The Iraqi shook his head.
"That was the third or fourth day."
Mansoor shook his. "The very first day," he insisted.
The failure to communicate was grounded in the difference between reports
filed up a brigade's chain of command and news circulated by word of mouth
around an anxious city. Mansoor's questioner was referring to a protest
several days earlier at Firdaus Square, where a statue of former president
Saddam Hussein once stood. Called to protest the shuttering of a newspaper
controlled by Sadr, the demonstration had come off without incident in
the eyes of the 1st Brigade soldiers who monitored it from nearby armor.
"We never fired a shot," Mansoor said. "At least none was
reported to me."
But for days afterward, Iraqis spoke with outrage of shots fired toward
the crowd from the nearby Baghdad Hotel, a fortified building protected
by private security contractors. After tanks moved near the crowd, there
was talk of innocents crushed under their treads.
Hearing this in the hallway afterward, the colonel made a face.
"We didn't roll over anyone," he said.
This calls to mind the origin of the Palestinian intifada in 1987. A traffic accident near the entrance to the Gaza Strip had killed Palestinian workers returning from Israel. Journalist Amira Hess later interviewed the activists who cheerfully admitted creating the lie, which spread like wildfire, that the killings were deliberate. In the resulting cycle of violence the truth soon didn’t matter.
This phenomenon is familiar, I believe, to any Christian working in the Arab Muslim world. If truth claims are pressed in conversation one soon finds that the truth is irrelevant, and no amount of argumentation can change the other’s view. One of the grossest manifestations of this is the claim, expressed again this week in the Al-Ahram weekly by an Egyptian professor at the American University in Cairo, that there is no proof of Arab or Muslim involvement in the September 11 terror attacks.
The easy explanation is that “Arab culture condones lying.” This is fair only insofar as Arabs are a subset of humanity, and all humans, unless being transformed by God’s grace, are liars. The same willingness to evade the truth exists in our own Western culture, as dialogue about abortion or evolution easily demonstrates. Still there is clearly a cultural disjunction evident in the meeting between the American officer and the Iraqi tribal leaders. Our culture, however flawed, has been seasoned toward truth-telling by centuries of the church’s experience of confession and forgiveness. Our neighbors in the Arab world have spent those same centuries in a grace-less Islamic culture where there is no remedy for shame other than to hide or deny it.
Just as in each of our lives, this will only be overcome by the personal experience of God’s grace. Neither argumentation nor even force of arms can establish the truth in our hearts. As I stood by the roadway in Amman I realized it was the American occupation I wanted to save. However good and well-intentioned that intervention is, it is still not identical with my calling to share the love of God in Christ. I crossed to the other side of the roadway and took a taxi back to my apartment, as the Easter sunrise began to lighten the sky.
