Night sweeps over the city of Mosul again. The setting of the sun is a palpable relief, bringing with it the welcome change from impossibly hot to merely unreasonably hot. The dust is still thick in the air, but it is possible from my position as I leave the Tactical Operations Center to see a plume of smoke rising up from a neighborhood a few kilometers away. Mosul's skyline, pierced by the minarets of countless mosques, is overshadowed by such pyres throughout the day. Each one allows you, from a safe distance, to estimate how many lives were lost and how many livelihoods destroyed in any twenty-four hour period.
Medieval physicians in Europe, working on the principle that the body is directed by diverse humours and that an imbalance of any humour would lead to an imbalance of emotion, conjectured that the feeling of hope was the result of too much blood in the system. This is the origin of the word "sanguine," which means both "hopeful" and "blood-like." Hope stems from an excess of blood.
After walking the streets of the Old District, over and over, and inspecting hundreds or thousands of houses built on foundations hundreds or thousands of years old, I wonder if the people of Mosul ever really strayed away from that medieval supposition. When everything is quiet and peaceful, they always strike me as suspicious, distrustful, fatalistic, waiting for the inevitable explosion. But in the aftermath of these blasts, with all of us exposed to an excess of blood, they respond in a way I hadn't anticipated. They seem relieved, optimistic, and hopeful for the future; perhaps that was the last time, they say. Perhaps that was the tipping point and now we can have peace. Maybe the insurgents have said all they wanted to say, maybe the discontent have expressed their rage, maybe everything will be all right. And they settle back into the niche of their existence, comfortable in their tenuous purchase on life in this city, and spend a few days blissfully content. As if there wasn't a war raging around them. But as the days pass, the restlessness begins again; people become more careful on the streets and express their fatalism over cups of chai. It has been too long, they say, and there must be another attack coming. A roadside bomb, perhaps, that will only destroy the curbs and delay my commute to work. Or a grenade that will block traffic and maybe wound one of my neighbors. Maybe random bursts from an assault rifle, or the deliberate murder of one of my family for the express purpose of proving the impotence of Coalition Forces to protect those that I love. Probably a car bomb that will destroy my house. The tension builds as the days go on until the prophesy is fulfilled, the bomb is detonated, and the cycle begins again. Every blast is a communal catharsis, temporary but welcome. Taken as a whole, sometimes I wonder if the entire insurgency is just how the city tries to heal itself by judicious blood-letting. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that they can only be sanguine when their world is sanguinary.
I have trouble sharing their optimism. As we push the insurgents further towards defeat, they grasp at more and more radical tactics. Sordid and reprehensible, as words, aren't properly equipped to tackle these tactics; they are the kind of debauched inhumanity you only find when fanaticism is at its most desperate. Three schoolgirls, aged 10-13, gunned down as they walked to school last week just so the insurgents can demonstrate how our clear-hold-retain operations have failed to drive them from the neighborhoods. A 13-year old boy is allowed to approach a Humvee because he is too young to pose a threat; his grenade kills one and critically wounds two infantrymen of my battalion. A small 10-year old boy throws yet another grenade at one of our trucks, smiling and waving afterward, unaware that he failed to pull the pin and that only an unnatural benevolence kept the men of the unit from gunning him down. Young children are recruited to throw rocks at us. The insurgents, by their own professions, declare that they will either immunize us to the rocks so as to make grenade attacks easier or force us into killing an unarmed child. I see the benefit to their plans, but no part of me can find how the child benefits. We may be cultural aliens, offering strange gifts of Western candy and backpacks from behind our kevlar skins, but we are clearly the only party who has any interest in seeing those children grow into a world where the clocks can't be faithfully set by the explosions.
With AVID (Arbitrary Victory in Iraq Day) rapidly approaching, we find an interesting and promising combination of political and military realities. We are winning. The Iraqi Security Forces are acting with more confidence and competence than we had ever expected, and they are stepping into the role quickly. The word of our imminent departure has done more to set them into action than months of training. The insurgency is dying. Unfortunately, the final death throes are the ugliest part of any life, and the enemy we face now is cornered, mad with rage, and utterly desperate. Nothing is sacred, no one is safe, and no rules apply. But the end is in sight, and though the final steps will be difficult, at this point I can declare that I am sanguine about the future.
