Iraq's Paradise Lost

Marty Peretz, 10/17/06:

Iraq has never been a kind place, though Baghdad was for nearly two millennia a truly cosmopolitan city. Until 1949, the Jews were a plurality in Baghdad. It was mostly there that the Babylonian Talmud was created some 1700 years ago. Now, the Jews are gone (mostly to Israel). And the Chaldeans and Assyrians, mostly murdered or, as Pat Moynihan once observed, living in Chicago. Aside from some 800,000 Christians, what is left are the Muslims, slaughtering each other day after day, divided by what occurred in what was not yet Iraq thirteen centuries before our time. An example of "the one Arab people," split asunder, not by nation because there aren't any, but by sect and sectarian hatred.