The Life of Others

July was the most violent month in Iraq over the past two years. August is the month in which U.S. combat troops leave the country, as envisaged in the security agreement signed between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President George W. Bush — as would happen anyway if no such agreement existed, and Barack Obama were, as he is, in power.

July was the most violent month of the last two years, the years in which violence continued daily but ceased to kill hundreds per day, and so we all thought that war had ended, and Iraq was safe. This August we will not know what’s going to become of Iraq. But it was July that showed to those who didn’t know — or didn’t want to know — that all the wounds opened by Saddam and later by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Paul Bremer’s help, are still there.

“Bush burned down Iraq, and Obama will flee the fire,” one writer told us around cups of tea and too many cigarettes in the cups of coffee in a hotel in Baghdad. It was mid-July. Hamed al-Maliki really thinks that Iraq will get much worse than it was before it can start over. When that happens, he believes that Iraq won’t be like the current Iraq, with 18 provinces and borders with Kuwait, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. There will be many Iraqs.

Joe Biden had a plan to divide Iraq. Bush and his brains had another. It was democracy, the government allied in Baghdad, with the domino effect tumbling to Damascus and, perhaps, to Tehran and Jerusalem. This plan scared many people. The king of Jordan warned that the numbers of Shiite Muslims would increase, uniting Hezbollah of Lebanon to Baghdad and to the Iran of the mullahs. Amr Mussa, head of an insignificant organization called the Arab League, warned that invading Iraq would be like “opening Pandora’s box.”

Then, the plans were dashed and the warnings were confirmed. Bush only wanted to leave with as little humiliation as possible. Obama, before being elected, explained that there are necessary wars, and others that are just stupid, and that he never wanted this one to be his. Therefore, the Americans will surely leave – even if in doing so, they are “delivering Iraq to Iran on a plate,” as a Sunni sheik who began fighting the U.S. said, and now can barely believe that they are leaving without Iraq even having a government.

In July, there were attacks against Shiite pilgrims and against Sunni militias formed to fight extremist foreigners who entered Iraq after the Americans. There was an attack against the Green Zone. There were suicide bombings with rockets and with weapons. It will also be so in September.

In Iraq, there are more newborns than there are deaths, and that’s something extraordinary. Death happens a lot in Iraq, every day since March 20, 2003. You die going to the market, and you die going to the hairdresser. Those who survive are tired of going through checkpoints, buying gasoline to fuel the generators and enjoying when there is electricity to fill the water tanks. Those who survive want to live and have decided that they have to continue working, getting married and even having children.

In Iraq, there are more newborns than there are deaths, and that’s something extraordinary. Saddam was a monster and the Americans invaded the country to only later engage themselves in the most stupid of occupations that history has yet to register. History has already registered the fultility of the occupation: You just have to read the magnificent “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, where a neoconservative kid who had been hired to reopen the Baghdad stock exchange managed to stay more than one year in Iraq without doing it because he wanted the most modern stock exchange in the world, and the Iraqis only wanted a blackboard and chalk. You just have to look for the great projects that should have “won hearts and minds” before the withdrawal and see that there are power plants that don’t work because the machines brought from the outside don’t work with the structures that already existed.

Hillary Clinton said three years ago that Iraq was now a problem for the Iraqis. The Iraqis already realized that and continue to live in fear, like they used to when there were people blowing themselves up everyday. The Americans saved us from a dictator. Then they did everything wrong, as always, from day one. They distributed the power between sects and fundamentalists, and they rejected other fundamentalists who had chosen to fight. The good ones fled if they had the chance, and they are never going back. Many good people were left behind. These are the same people that in 2003 wanted to trust the politicians that had come with the Americans and today only want to have a few more hours of daylight. The playwriter Maliki can only see more war and then a desert. Slowly, from the desert a new future may rise. But July was the most violent month of the last two years, and September may well be worse.