Damien Cave in today's New York Times: "Shatha al-Musawi, a Shiite member of Parliament, first encountered the Sunni-Shiite divide on the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. Hearing the news with a close Sunni friend named Sahira, Ms. Musawi erupted like a child.
VideoMore Video » “I jumped, I shouted, I came directly to Sahira and I hugged her,” Ms. Musawi said. “I was crying, and I said, ‘Sahira, this is the moment we waited for.’ ”
At least it should have been: Mr. Hussein’s henchmen killed Ms. Musawi’s father when she was only 13; Sahira, too, was a victim, losing her closest uncle to the Hussein government.
But instead of celebrating, Sahira stood stiffly. A day later, Ms. Musawi said, Sahira’s eyes were red from crying. And before long, like so many Sunnis and Shiites here, the two stopped talking...
“Mr. Bush promised Iraq would be a democratic and free country,” she said. “And we believed that.”
Then she laughed. It did not take long, she said, before Iraq started to fracture. In Ms. Musawi’s mixed neighborhood of Adel, Shiite mosques and religious schools closed by the Sunni-dominated government began to reopen immediately after Mr. Hussein’s fall.
Some Sunni Arabs, she said, felt threatened. Soon, Sunni customers at the tailor’s shop where she worked stopped visiting. Her own dinner guests, she acknowledged, were mostly Shiite.
Violence followed. In late 2003, Ms. Musawi said, she saw two cars of men abduct an official at a Shiite mosque near her home, tie him to a car and drag him through the streets. Some of the attackers were young men she had known as boys.
“Are you crazy?” she shouted. “Have you lost your mind?” ...
Around the same time, gunmen killed the Shiite mayor of Baghdad, Haider Ali, who lived two houses away from her. She said another neighbor, a Sunni and one of Mr. Ali’s guards, was probably responsible.
“We were shocked, really,” she said. “We used to have friends, neighbors. In every moment, when you met a person, you didn’t think: Is he Shia or Sunni? Of course you’d notice, but it didn’t matter.”
Then at some point, she said, it switched; sect became the defining characteristic for Iraqis. Her Sunni friends told her she did not understand. Being Sunni used to count for something, they said...
“I can’t stand seeing them controlling things again,” she said. “I can’t stand seeing them in power.”
If her opponents reach out a hand to shake on a deal, she said, “I think the other hand is hiding a dagger.”"
It is near impossible for someone to instantly overcome the wounds that have been perpetrated on them and their families. That is the miracle of Mandela -- to come out of his experience with benevolence is unheard of, and it runs counter to human nature. To think that the Iraqis could emerge from Saddam's tyranny without bearing the scars of what they'd been through was Alden Pyle through and through. The only question now is how much new blood must be shed to bury the demons of the past, and are we just perpetuating the cycle for another generation by going through this awful period.