The ever-curious Charlie Rose deserves kudos for hosting Saad Eskander, the Iraqi national librarian, the other night. It is the kind of interchange that I as an optimist want to think can change America: an intelligent, sensitive Arab speaks from the heart to an elite American peers. Let’s learn to love the Iraqis, now that we have crumpled their society.
The most moving thing Eskander said was that he had stopped writing a blog in August. The blog was a professional’s view of the terrors of life in Baghdad, including regular reports on the torture, displacement, and murders of library staff. And observations like this: "One of the national newspapers revealed that the Minister of Culture
issued a ministerial memorandum in which he granted his own bodyguards
financial rewards. The ironic thing is that the memorandum was signed
ten days after the Minister went into hiding!!"
Here is the last entry from that blog:
There will be no Diary any more. The real reason is that I feel guilty about writing it. For sometime now, I have felt deep-down that I have been exploiting the tragedies and sacrifices of my staff,
especially those who lost their lives. I discovered that by writing the diary I put a very heavy moral burden on my shoulders; as if I have been emotionally blackmailing the readers. I do strongly believe that I have no right to do so. I seize this opportunity to apologize sincerely to everybody….
I can’t tell you how moving it was to watch this grave, literary Iraqi describe this decision sitting at Rose’s dark table on American television. The word that came to mind was: holocaust. That’s what’s been visited on Iraq. I use the word the way I first heard it, at the end of The Great Gatsby: "…Gatsby’s pneumatic mattress lolled in the water trailing a crimson
wide-track… it was only later that the gardener noticed Wilson’s body
in the grass, and the holocaust was complete." I know, that was 1928. But the word has power, and can be used to describe other horrors than The Holocaust… I pity the Iraqi people and hope that my country will feel specially connected to them.
