What went wrong

Americans failed to anticipate the bitter consequences of their intervention -- the rise of Islamism, the bloody sectarian struggles, the rejection of the occupation -- because of the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between America and the Arab world, "two cultures so estranged that they cannot occupy the same place." The painful, even tragic irony is that it was precisely the most altruistic of America's numerous and shifting motivations for the invasion that proved the superpower's fatal blind spot. Americans, Shadid argues, were misled by their fixation on Saddam's dreadful regime. "Our nearly absolute emphasis on the all-encompassing tyranny blinded many of us to everything else that was there," he writes. "Time and again, we envisioned, or were given, a simple, two-dimensional portrait of a country, waiting for aid and dreaming of freedom as it suffered under the unrelenting terror of a dictator ... Once the dictator was removed, by force if need be, Iraq would be free, a tabula rasa in which to build a new and different state."

This was, and is, the moral justification used by the Bush administration, and righteously proclaimed by the pro-war liberals who made the fateful choice to sign up with the most reactionary, and incompetent, administration in modern American history. Of course, as Shadid points out, there were larger strategic reasons for the invasion. "If we can change Iraq, George W. Bush and his determined lieutenants maintained, we can change the Arab world, so precariously adrift after decades of broken promises of progress and prosperity. This rhetoric -- idealistic to Western ears, reminiscent of century-old colonialism to a Third World audience -- envisioned the dawn of a democratic and just Middle East, guided by a benevolent United States. For the Americans, aroused by fears of terrorism, Baghdad, the capital of the Arab world's potentially most important state, was the obvious choice for a place to begin a wave of democratic reform. This rationale for invasion ran at least as deep as the illusory warnings about weapons of mass destruction or the rhetoric emphasizing the tyranny of Saddam. Iraq was an instrument of change for the U.S., a lever to pull, the first Middle Eastern domino to fall."

Those grandiose dreams, like pieces on a Risk board set up by a child in the middle of a busy street, lie scattered today, as Islamist terrorists run amok, the mullahs in Iran sit in the strategic driver's seat, America and its ally Israel are even more despised throughout the region than before and Iraq hangs on the edge of a civil war, its people traumatized by two and a half years of violence and chaos. By deposing Saddam and removing all authority, the United States opened the Pandora's box of Islamism. As in a nightmare, by trying to prevent something from happening, America did exactly the reverse. Shadid's book is a gripping, on-the-ground report about how things went so terribly wrong. The story Shadid tells does not entirely fit into the ideological assumptions of either conservatives or liberals -- neither of which was particularly coherent. But it vindicates the liberal position far more than the conservative.

Shadid's tale begins with the American invasion, which he witnessed firsthand from Baghdad. Before he arrived, he had been reporting from other countries in the Middle East, where anti-American sentiment, largely muted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, was raging in response to subsequent U.S. policies. "The American response to the destruction of that day -- the martial rhetoric of the Bush administration; the dispatch of the U.S. military to Afghanistan; and the detention of prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo Bay -- had evoked Arab anger as the lopsided conflict between Israel and the Palestinians accelerated further. Anyone who defied the Americans was admired. Osama bin Laden, whose venomous ideology actually alienates the vast majority of Arabs, had become an unlikely folk hero." When Shadid arrived in Iraq, this strident anti-Americanism (expressed in a hit pop song blasting the coming invasion and invoking "Chechnya! Afghanistan! Palestine! Southern Lebanon! The Golan Heights! And now Iraq, too?" with the refrain "Enough! Enough! Enough!") was replaced by a nervous quiet. But later, after the invasion was over, Iraqis began to voice the same bitter grievances. It turned out Iraq, even after being liberated, was still an Arab country, and a Muslim one.

Again and again, when talking to Iraqis, Shadid found deep historical grievances against the U.S and the West. Far more than Americans ever understood, Iraqis remember and are bitterly resentful of British colonialism -- a view that colored their attitudes toward the American invaders from the start. It is not as if this was unknown: It is a central theme of Rashid Khalidi's prescient "Resurrecting Empire," written before, during and immediately after the invasion. But the neocons who plotted the war were ignorant of history and convinced that the Americans' noble intentions would set them apart. In this belief, they unwittingly followed in the footsteps of the British. Shadid writes, "There's a line from history that nearly everyone in Baghdad remembers: 'Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.' The speaker was Major General Sir Stanley Maude, the British commander who in 1917 entered the capital to end Ottoman rule ... The idea has proved memorable. So has the aftermath, a legacy that Iraqis ruefully note. The British remained in Iraq and in control of its oil for decades." The fact that the Bush administration uttered almost exactly the same line about its intentions was, of course, also noted in Baghdad.

To the skepticism born of colonial rule was added profound distrust of America. There are several reasons for this -- its role in the first Gulf War, its support for the devastating U.N. sanctions (Shadid notes that the sanctions doubled Iraq's infant mortality and led one-third of 6-year-olds to drop out of school), its betrayal of both the Kurds and the Shiites during the first war -- but probably the biggest one is America's nearly total support for Israel. The plight of the Palestinians is the open wound of the Middle East, the grievance felt most deeply and bitterly by Arabs and Muslims around the world. And again to a far greater degree than Americans who have not traveled in the Arab world realize, the issue of Palestine has poisoned the goodwill Arabs once felt for America. Iraq is no exception. Shadid notes that even the official American announcement, in May 2003, that it was an occupying power deepened the rift between the U.S. and Iraqis because for Arabs, the word "occupation," ihtilal, conjures up searing images of Israeli tanks smashing through refugee camps. Iraqi anger over the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and over America's unqualified support for Israel, boils up many times in this book.

Next Page: Educated Iraqis who hated Saddam still denounced the U.S. invasion

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