Turning Points (Robin Wright, Sunday WP)

[huckleberry]

Turning Points
Will the Modern Era Come Untethered in Iraq?
By Robin Wright
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page B01

On a warm spring day in 1983, I stood across from what had been the seven-story U.S. embassy in Beirut and watched as rescuers picked through tons of mangled steel, torn concrete and glass shards -- the rubble left by the first Muslim suicide bomber to strike an American target. Tenderly, rescuers put bits of bodies -- more than 60 were killed in the lunchtime bombing -- in small blue plastic bags.

Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.

snip

The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

more at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28339-2004May14.html