Take a look at this photo. Care to guess what it is?
OK, guessing over. It's from Michael Yon's recent dispatch:
"Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s [church]. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, "Come back to Iraq. Come home." They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. "Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq."
You've got to be a pretty sorry excuse for a human being not to find this inspiring. St. John's is located in downtown Baghdad, and it was a local Muslim man who invited the soldiers of C Company 2-12 Cavalry to come and be part of the historic event. As Michael notes in "Thanks and Praise" The work seems to have been a community effort.
"The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother."
This speaks to a couple of things. One, it does speak to the situation in Iraq as it is, and as experienced by those living there. Which isn't a bad start when trying to formulate an intelligent and decent policy going forward, amidst a set of options expanded by success, rather than leaving the folks in this picture hostage to the whims of one's own personal "I hate America/ I love America" Rorschach Test.
It also speaks to the humanity of the people we're dealing with more directly - people who in many cases might be considered as potentially on the Other Side. Islam's record is fairly clearly one of aggressive religious intolerance, and folks who try to whitewash that do the truth no service. Yet the events Michael portrays suggest that this may not be its only future option. Nor is this just a single event. He also says, in "Come Home":
"LTC Michael told me today that when al Qaeda came to Dora, they began harassing Christians first, charging them “rent.” [JK: likely a form of jizya, the head tax levied on non-Muslims as a sign of their submission] It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda."
The war that Islamists have been waging against several civilizations, conducted mostly but not wholly through terrorism, can still end in many different ways. Michael's dispatches reach beyond issues of Iraq to remind us that at least one of those possible futures is a hopeful one.
But it's only one future - and if we want it, we'll have to work for it.