Shroud of ghamidh

Iraqi man wanders among the ruins. Ali Al-Saadi/AFP- Getty

Anthony Shadid writes in today Washington Post about what comes next in Iraq. It is a sad, complex situation. Shadid observes "The war in Iraq is indeed over, at least the conflict as it was understood during its first five years: insurgency, communal cleansing, gangland turf battles and an anarchic, often futile quest to survive. In other words, civil war—though civil war was always too tidy a term for it. The entropy, for now at least, has run its course. So have many of the forces the United States so dangerously unleashed with its 2003 invasion, turning Iraq into an atomized, fractured land seized by a paroxysm of brutality. In that Iraq, the Americans were the final arbiter and, as a result, deprived anything they left behind of legitimacy."

An Iraq man in the article described the state of things as ghamidh. In Arabic the term ghamidh means mysterious and unclear.

As for our continued involvement that term can also describe our future, both in Iraq, the middle East and around the world. At least change is in the air.
Hopefully the fog will begin to lift in 2009.