THIS morning I went to Samarra town ... It’s a wonderfully picturesque little walled town with the huge golden dome of the shrine closing the vista, incongruously enough, in the narrow tumble down streets. I shall go back and photograph some morning when there is sun. — Gertrude Bell to her mother, Nov. 22, 1917

What’s in a dome? To Shias in Iraq and elsewhere, Samarra’s Askariyan shrines embodied sacredness, identity and community. Its destruction was an existential body blow. Those who bombed it correctly calculated that this would be an act of political mobilization vastly more effective than the drip-drip of roadside bombs and murdered Iraqis. Not just the mobilization of Shias but the counter-mobilization of Sunnis, possibly tipping Iraq into a Hobbesian state of chaos and sinking America’s hopes for a satisfactory ending to its misadventure in Mesopotamia.

The global information revolution vastly intensifies the power of symbols — witness the Danish cartoon controversy and its effect on Muslims the world over. Symbolic catastrophes elicit mass fascination and revulsion simultaneously.

Even as a mob killed three television reporters for Al-Arabiya satellite channel who were rushing to cover the destruction of the dome, hundreds of others were reported hurrying to the scene to photograph the damage on their cell phones. The totality of the destruction — now you see it, now you don’t — sears the community’s consciousness and reshapes the political terrain. Think of our own “dome” — the twin towers. Electronically “immortalized,” will Samarra become an iconic tipping point not only toward Shia-Sunni warfare in Iraq but also toward America’s failure?

The astute students in the Iraqi insurgency learned one lesson very well: In the struggle to reshape political identities and loyalties, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and a shattered dome is worth a thousand bodies. Insurgents everywhere will study the lessons of Samarra. So let us hope that the guardians of the Dome of the Rock, St. Peter’s dome, and the dome on the US Capitol will be extra vigilant in the months and years ahead.—Dawn/Washington Post News Service