Ending Horrors Justifies the Iraq War

When I close my eyes, I see Adnan Farrage Sa’edi, a Shiite and former inmate at the Hakamiyeh prison, bent on his knees, arms jerked upward. He showed me that position to simulate the hook and crank that leisurely lifted him 2 meters off the ground by his bound hands, dislocating his shoulders. Pop, pop.

Sa’edi is now curator at the Hakamiyeh museum in Baghdad, once a Mukhabarat interrogation center and now a memorial to the tortured, those who scratched pleas and prayers onto prison walls, grinding their fingernails to the flesh.

I am obsessed with the Mook, which is what some journalists here call the Iraqi Mukhabarat, or secret police. I’ve interviewed the tortured and their tormentors and numerous Iraqis who still quiver at the mere mention of the name Mukhabarat.

Perhaps I’m obsessed with this story because I wonder who those men were who tugged on Sa’edi’s feet to ensure that the joints were sufficiently plucked.

I traveled to Iraq to report on the country’s reconstruction -- the critical bandage under which this region might be allowed to heal. But only after I arrived did I realize that my mission was also to document the horror.

During my first trip, in April and May, just days after Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled, I covered the exhumation of a mass grave in Al-Hilla, south of Baghdad. Days before, farmers and family members rushed to the spot where it was rumored that Hussein’s soldiers had machine-gunned thousands of people a dozen years earlier. They hacked at the earth with shovels and bare hands, ripping out corpses piecemeal from their resting places. It didn’t matter to whom those particular bones once belonged. The cavities left behind pocked the ancient Babylonian landscape.

Within the next few days, humanitarian workers packed the remains of 3,000 bodies in large plastic bags. Each was no bigger than the folded and wrapped Persian carpet I brought home from Baghdad.

As an American, I’m proud that the American invasion, regardless of the reasons it was launched, decapitated this regime and uncovered its horrors.

I will always remember the man to whom I’d casually waved, just after the fall of Hussein’s regime, in the Shiite slum of Sadr City (formerly Saddam City). He’d been riding a motorcycle looted from Uday Hussein. He waved me over and asked whether I was American. I warily admitted I was, unsure of the consequences of the answer. The man, young but old-looking, with a beard bristly as a pine forest, grabbed my shoulders, snapped me toward him and kissed me. On both cheeks. He smelled of rotten meat and 3-day-old fruit. “Thank you, America,” he said. Then he lifted his shirt. A virtual rail yard was etched in scars on his back. His legs were no better. The hair would never grow back where his skull had been split by a lead pipe.

And I knew that what we had done -- so far -- was good.

Every day revealed a new story, but there was one constant. As I left the hotel each morning a boy would tug on my sleeve and chirp: “Hello, mista, mista. I love you. Give me your wallet.”

I laughed, but also wondered how long it would take to supplant the “give me” mentality with “help me do it myself.”

It is no coincidence that Hussein rose to power in Iraq. As the Mook agent whom I had interviewed told me, Iraqis are good at taking orders; they have done it with great aplomb for 35 years of dictatorial reign. Why stop now? Many have little sense of what democracy is, why it is and what it can do for them.

Journalists joke: “One imam, one vote.” People here know the tribal system, but not the electoral system. They trust their religious leaders but few others. They will vote for the imams they know, rather than the political candidates they don’t. And if the United States does not gut this one out, Iraq, brittle from ancient religious internecine hatreds, might shatter. The Mooks, and the moujahedeen, willing executioners, await their opportunity.