The other option, of course, is an optimism that effaces the depth of our, the West's, own collective crime.
This is the West telling Iraqis that they can't maintain any continuity with their past, that all they can do is begin a new climb out of barbarism because we we we did something so evil. Either the Iraq war and the attendant crimes were a singular, irreducible obscenity that broke a people, dissociated a nation from itself. In our narrative, and I don't know how I feel about that. An act-an age-of abject violence that, in our narrative, cuts Baghdadis (and Iraqis) off from who they though they were, leaves them shellshocked and paralyzed.
The New York of the Middle Ages, the prosperous and cultivated yet suffering and scared capital of despots from the enlightened founder, al-Mansur, who tragically named it Madinat as-Salaam, the City of Peace, down to the (we'll say with what may be distressing understatement) unenlightened Saddam, is separated from the post-2003 world, much much more than America is from the pre-2001 world, by a traumatic break. And I was just looking at Baghdad pictures in the effort to identify the mosque in question, and-although I have to say that a triumphalist retort to the piece (paid for by the Rumsfeld Foundation and the Project for a New American Century) could easily enough slap the words "Because there is and always will be a city of Baghdad" on a picture of the city's new $7 billion international airport, with the unexpected swooping light fixtures that evoke medieval vaulted ceilings-it wouldn't convince, because in the eyes of the world the old Baghdad is dead. A cheap ambiguity and a stock photo, and it conjures up the full-blooded presence of a world that was very different from ours, but no less real, and when the artist was working must have appeared to have been gone forever.
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