Trump Was Correct: We Are Suckers and Losers

America's Betrayal Will Never Be Erased

Jolani’s handiwork, Baghdad 2006 (Commons)

I know Ahmed al-Sharra, also known as Muhammad Jolani. I hunted him for years, and I remember his handiwork from the slums of Baghdad.

I remember the screams of his victims. They penetrate my consciousness and reverberate in my dreams. Those dreams have resurfaced, creating ill effects. My sleeping patterns have been altered, yet again, by our government’s dishonorable conduct.

Al Qaeda in Iraq’s car bombs killed and maimed thousands. I used to walk through the wreckage. The puddles of blood stained my combat boots. I remember the innocent Iraqis, many of them Christian, in Baghdad’s Karrada peninsula and their shrieks of agony as the life drained from their mutilated bodies. That’s why Jolani and his compatriots repeatedly targeted that area—they wanted to kill and maim Christians, thereby displaying America’s impotence.

During the Summer of Death in 2006, I stepped through scores of such scenes, chronicling Jolani’s deeds. It was the first time I saw a dead baby. She hadn’t died quite yet; her arms and legs were missing. And as I stepped toward her, I immediately knew she would die as the shrapnel had pierced an artery.

There was nothing I could do. So I left her to die, screaming on the streets of Baghdad.

Instead, I tried to collect information. How many killed? How did they orchestrate the attack?

But, in 2006, all that information was merely fed into the machine. We were losing the war, and everyone knew it, especially the Iraqis, who understandably wondered how the world’s lone superpower could be so staggeringly incompetent.

Many erstwhile allies walked away from me as I tried to recruit sources. They wanted nothing to do with an “ally” who couldn’t even protect the weak and vulnerable. During the Summer of Death, everyone was trying to survive, myself included.

We all made decisions that we regret. We all lost our souls and naivety in the slums of Baghdad. Jolani’s group, who had triggered the Sunni-Shia Civil War with the aptly planned Samarra Mosque bombing, reaped the whirlwind. Iraq teetered on the edge of disaster.

Jolani’s Seminal Work: The Samarra Mosque Bombing (Commons)

All we could do was report to the higher headquarters. I was a glorified reporter. Nothing more, nothing less. And the men and women who suffered under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General George Casey’s incompetence were never the same.

There were suicides. Families, like mine, were torn asunder. Despite all the heartaches, at least I felt that we had served honorably and that although numerous administrations had blundered, I never felt that they dishonored America’s combat troops.

That all ended with President elect-Donald Trump and Joe Biden.