Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Saddam Sentinels
Friday, December 29, 2006

Ever since I wanted to walk the Bible I wanted to go to Iraq. So many of the seminal moments in the ancient world happened on the shores of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Creation. The Garden of Eden. The Tower of Babel. The birth of Abraham. I tried, and was thwarted, on my original journey, begun in 1998, that resulted in Walking the Bible. When I committed to do the follow-up, Where God Was Born, I knew I needed to go, as the central event in the second half of the Bible, the exile in Babylon, took place in Mesopotamia.

For years I watched Saddam. I read stories of journalists who had submitted themselves to one of his minders and traveled into the heart of his regime. One night, at a party in New York, I ran into Bob Simon, the CBS News correspondent who had been imprisoned during the first Gulf War. "I want to go to Iraq," I said. "I can help you," he said. "I've been back several times since." We agreed to have lunch the following week. Three days days later came 9-11, and I put my book aside to write Abraham.

The fall of Saddam in April 2003 seemed to present another opportunity to go to Iraq. As is painfully detailed in Where God Was Born, I said goodbye to my wife of six months and traveled to Baghdad in February 2004. The war was still waging, though few had the courage to call it a war then (the glow of "Mission Accomplished" still held the American media in sway). But Baghdad still showed the effects of the original shock and awe bombing. And as I drove around the city I didn't even notice, at first, the many pedestals that stood empty. They seemed part of the wreckage. Then I realized: These were the pedestals where statues of Saddam once stood, just like the one in Firdoos Square we all watched on television that morning. The statues were not bombed off; they were pulled off by Iraqis. The empty concrete pillars reminded me of the Sherman's Sentinels we saw growing up in Georgia left over from the Civil War, lone chimneys where once houses stood, burned down by Union soldiers during their march to the sea.

Saddam Sentinels.

Once, in Basra, I asked an Iraqi policeman if he would climb onto the pedestal and pose for a picture. He did, stuck out his arm as if to mock the heroic pose that Saddam took in all his statues. We all laughed. But after a minute, he climbed down. The wounds were still too fresh, the fear too recent. One of the saddest lessons of the painful years since that day was that it has become all the more apparent that one legacy of his tyranny is that the culture of revenge, darkness, inter-denominational rivalry, and brute force he helped cultivate has been nearly impossible to expunge. Saddam may be dead, but his rein of terror continues, at least for now.

Labels: Middle East

Posted by B Feiler at 9:54 PM
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