Lessons from Erbil
Unintended Consequences
The bullets of an Al Qaeda militant left Mustafa paralyzed and unable to speak.
The scars on his face told a story. It must have been a year after the shooting. But I was too distracted by his mother and the hole in his hip to consider the scar on his face where the bullet had entered his body.
I was visiting my friend Aveen. Her older brother had met this family at the hospital and invited them for lunch.
I will never forget the look on his face. His brown eyes cringing. His lips attempting to move but unable to voice a protest. His disgust at his mother for making his body a visual aid in the gruesome telling of their private miseries.
Mustafa, then eighteen, was lying on a floor mattress next to his mother. She was wrinkled and self-neglected, dressed in a black abaya like most women her age, hair covered except for the henna-dyed orange strands that trickled down behind her ears. Her thick hands teased prayer beads as she whispered the attributes of God.
When I entered the room, they began telling me the story. Such a shame, they repeated. He was just seventeen. He was so smart and handsome, they said. He was going to be an engineer.
It was a terrorist. The bullets shot up the corner store. He had gone in to buy tomato paste. It was just bad luck.
Mustafa laid there blinking while the people around him talked to the foreign woman observing him. As if that wasn’t humiliating enough for the young man, his mother then abandoned her prayer beads, picked up his body, and rolled him over on her lap. She pulled down his pants and revealed a massive bed sore on his hip.
I will never forget the look on his face. His brown eyes cringing. His lips attempting to move but unable to voice a protest. His disgust at his mother for making his body a visual aid in the gruesome telling of their private miseries.
The wound revealed to me was the size of a fist. It was a hollow area where the skin had worn away. I could see inside his body a cavity of bone and tissue.
Why was she showing me this? What could I do to help?
I was just dropping by for a tea.
At the time, I believed she was showing me this window into her family's suffering because she wanted me to help him get a visa to the U.S. so her son get the best medical help available. I was American. Surely I could make this happen.
As I look back now, I don't think she was showing me her son's paralysis and cavernous hip for that purpose. I believe she was showing me, an American, the unintended consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Mustafa, the smart, handsome prospective engineer, who couldn’t even protest when his mother rolled him on her lap like a prop, died a few months later.
Winston Churchill, in his preface to The Gathering Storm, writes:
“It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into large organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which alone can give security to humble masses…”
When I first read this, I found it fascinating that Churchill understood World War II as preventable; it helped me see that I'd wrongfully conceived of the war as inevitable.
In contrast, nearly everyone sees the Second Gulf War as a preventable tragedy.
Mustafa’s story is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about the importance of listening, learning, and language. These remain our strongest bulwark against the violence triggered by stupidity, incompetence, and malice, which lead–inevitably–to avoidable suffering, to unintended consequences.