The New Republic

SHORTLY AFTER SADDAM HUSSEIN'S ouster in 2003, I visited Emad Levy and his father, Ezra, at their starkly furnished home in Baghdad. Emad was the city's last rabbi, and he and his father were two of its only remaining Jews. I wasn't the only Westerner who stopped by their house in those heady days immediately following the end of Saddam's rule. Harold Rhode, a Pentagon official, had visited recently along with Tamara Chalabi, daughter of Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad. So had a Daily Telegraph reporter from London. Everyone had their reasons for stopping in. READ MORE >>

Each morning, as the sun rises over the streets of Baghdad, the bodies appear—burned, slashed, drilled, sometimes handcuffed, and, as often as not, decapitated. Many are the victims of sectarian violence, but this depressingly familiar fate does not account for all of them. There are also the bodies of Iraqi liberals, U.S. Army translators, and others who were killed for their association with the Americans. READ MORE >>

Six days ago, bombs went of at a Baghdad university, and some 70 people--mostly students--were the numbered dead when the counting stopped. One hundred and fifty, maybe more, were wounded and maimed. Then, today again in Baghdad, another 75 men and women were slaughtered in a local marketplace after two bombs exploded, which also left more than 175 people injured, disfigured and limbless. In between these two atrocities, other bombings, beheadings, shootings were carried out. Who knows the real murder toll? The fact is no one. READ MORE >>

Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East  By Ali M. Ansari (Basic Books, 280 pp., $26) Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic By Ray Takeyh (Times Books, 260 pp., $25) Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions By Shahram Chubin (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 223 pp., $12.95) READ MORE >>

I can't even imagine Iraq anymore. It exceeds my capacity to visualize horror. In a recent interview with The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, a woman named Fatima put it this way: "One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing, and one-third of us will be widows." At the Baghdad morgue, they distinguish Shia from Sunnis because the former are beheaded and the latter are killed with power drills. Moqtada Al Sadr has actually grown afraid of his own men. I came of age believing the United States had a mission to stop such evil. And now, not only isn't the United States stopping it- READ MORE >>

Last month, at a grubby Italian restaurant near a military base in North Carolina, I had dinner with a senior Army officer I had met in Iraq. We drank, talked about the war, and, on the television above the bar, we watched the fall of Washington. The dueling commentators on the TV screen were saying that theupcoming elections would doom the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. They were sure of themselves: This was unquestionably a Tet moment. Or was it Waterloo? READ MORE >>

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A few days ago, the brother of my friend Osman was one of seven Sunni workers in a shop in a mixed neighborhood of western Baghdad who were rounded up at gunpoint by Mahdi Army militiamen and taken to the local Shia mosque. There, they were taunted about Saddam Hussein's death sentence and then, one by one, shot in the head. Osman's brother was only grazed and survived. But, when the bodies were loaded into a pickup truck and brought to a nearby Iraqi Army checkpoint, a soldier in uniform noticed that he was still alive. READ MORE >>

The surest way to map Iraq's ethnic and sectarian fault lines is by how quickly a U.S. helicopter flies over them. Choppers race over Sunni areas, nearly sideways to the ground in some places. But, a few miles outside of the town of Sinjar by the Syrian border, the Blackhawks slow to a leisurely speed: Yezidi live below. These ancient people, who number in the thousands and consider themselves neither Christian nor Muslim, cherish their occupiers. Yezidi party leader Waad Hamed Modo greets me in a Sinjar courtyard with his own testimonial. "I met recently with Sunnis in Baghdad," he says. READ MORE >>

At the beginning of August, President Bush introduced a war-weary American public to an old conservative slander disguised as a new approach to the Iraq war. Shifting from his earlier rhetoric of optimism, he gave a series of election-timed speeches that were noticeably grim. Bush no longer emphasized the prospects of success; rather, he spoke of the danger of defeat. "Some politicians look at our efforts in Iraq and see a diversion from the war on terror," he said in a speech late last month. READ MORE >>