David Ignatius: Agents of Innocence

“Jamal answered me: ‘You are right. America loves us. But it is the love of a man for his mistress. We are fun for a night. Maybe for a whole month. But do not ever forget that this man America is married to someone else, and he will always go back to his wife in the end.’ And who is this wife? I said. But I knew the answer. The wife is Israel. And that is what killed Jamal. The wife got jealous and killed the mistress.

“We really are such fools, we Arabs. We really deserve what we get from you. That is why I cannot complain too much. It is our own fault.

“I thought that Mr. Rogers would live forever. I loved him as if he was my own brother, and when he died, the part of me that had hope also died. I could not work for anyone else. So I tried to understand what killed him.

“One answer is easy. He was killed by the thing that he was trying to stop. There was a disease of terrorism that began to infect this country about the time he came to Lebanon. He saw it. He understood how dangerous it was. He told me so many times. He knew that people were learning how to make little bombs, then big bombs, then car bombs. I would not even be surprised if he had once known, somewhere, the very man who made the bomb that killed him. Lebanon is a small country, and Mr. Rogers knew everyone. The people who paid for the bomb were probably Iranians. But they had caught the disease from Lebanon. That is where it began. Even the Iranians come to Lebanon to fight their wars.

“So maybe what killed Rogers was that he was unlucky. He saw the debris falling all around him and he forgot to get out of the way.

“But the more I thought about what happened, I decided that something else killed Mr. Rogers. It had to do with Jamal. Perhaps it was a kind of curse.

“You may think that Rogers’s mistake was to lie down with the Devil. I understand what you are thinking. You say that he had a pact with a man who was a terrorist, and that this pact opened the door that let in the wind that blew down the house. If you make a deal with a man whose hands are covered with blood, some of it sticks to you. And if the Americans had not helped Jamal, maybe Lebanon would have survived the disease. Maybe the civil war would not have come and destroyed the country, setting loose all the madmen. I know what you are saying, but you are wrong.

“The truth is very simple, Mr. Hoffman. So simple that it took me many months to see it. It is this: The only man on earth who could have saved Tom Rogers that day at the embassy was Jamal Ramlawi. He was the only person the Americans had ever known in Lebanon who could have penetrated the terrorist cell, learned of the plot, and stopped the car with the bomb before it reached the embassy. But Jamal Ramlawi was dead, and there was no one else to save Tom Rogers.

“Now you know what I know.

“Effendi:

“Do you know what I just heard on the radio? It is a report from Lebanon. The radio says that the Lebanese Christians have decided that they need an ally against the Syrians. So they are allowing the Palestinian fighters to come back into Lebanon, to fight against the Syrians. Can you imagine this? We fought a war for ten years, Christians and Moslems-we killed 100,000 people-because the Christians believed that it was necessary to push the Palestinian fighters out of Lebanon forever. And now they want them to come back!

“So now we know what this war was about, Mr. Hoffman. It was about nothing.”