9. The End Relays To The Beginning
IRAQ … MESOPOTAMIA … Dawn of civilizations… Reverberating voice from time immemorial that defied demise to remain a living attestation of a great heritage from greater ancestors who bequeathed to the world the first script and the first wheel. Sumer, Babylonia, Nineveh, Ur … names canonized in history’s memory for thousands of years. Homeland of two munificent immortals, the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as being, according to tradition, the land of Abraham, and beyond him, the Eden of Adam and Eve. A land hallowed and no less damned, where one prodigious civilization followed upon another, and one war birthed another. Homeland of the Assyrians , the Sumerians , the Akkadians , and the Chaldeans , yet also a land racked by a notorious totalitarianism unparalleled by any other in recent history. And a hapless nation ruled by a vicious megalomaniac who ‘excelled’ in producing three wars and pulverizing every link to civilization in every side and corner of what used to be a country on...