Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
The New Yorker correspondent witnessed the fall of Saddam and the beginning of the uprising. But he fails to explore the destruction Saddam did to the souls of his people.
Oct 19, 2004 | You'd guess it less and less from the news, but it's easy to become infatuated with Iraq. As a measure of my own fascination, my heart leapt when I saw "Baghdad" on the departures board at Dubai Airport two weeks ago, although I was on my way to my first love among war zones, Afghanistan. Iraq felt like a might-have-been great romance. And I was not alone: One of my embedded reporter friends was nearly on the verge of tears when he left in May 2003 after two months of sand, heat and shooting. Baghdad is ugly and polluted and the situation continues to deteriorate. Yet journalists I know have returned again and again.
What grabbed us is the people, their warmth and paradoxical openness. They can give of themselves fully. My driver in Baghdad -- everyone I knew there, and Jon Lee Anderson, too, bonded with their driver -- spoke to me about his life. It felt no different from listening to a good friend. I am sure there are thoughts he did not want to share with an American, a non-Muslim and a woman, but he shared his feelings. This is a trait I've noticed in Afghans, too, and I've come to the conclusion that it is the one positive effect of living under oppressive or corrupt governments.
My friend Roberto, a Colombian businessman, had an insight into this. "Of course you think people in the Third World are nicer. We are. But we are nicer because we have no rules. That is how we get things done. All Third World countries are like that." He might have added, "and all dictatorships."
The dark other side to this coin has been more obvious in the last year and a half in Iraq. It's the deformations of character that living under a bad government produces. Saddam Hussein didn't just terrorize his people -- and Anderson's book, "The Fall of Baghdad," is full of abundant evidence of the degree to which he did. Saddam accomplished something more horrifying. He deprived them of a context where moral choice and responsibility had a meaning. One of the side effects of this is ambient depression and negativity.
Interviewing Iraqis in late May and early June of 2003, I heard a litany of complaints about the situation -- no security, jobs, electricity, water or trash pickup. I was getting the impression that Iraqis -- especially the educated and relatively affluent -- were whiny, self-pitying, defensive and exaggeratedly pessimistic. (As a Jew, I hope I'm entitled to say that they sometimes reminded me of the worst of my own people.) Yet when I asked when the American troops should leave, the answer was always that it shouldn't be anytime soon. And I was greeted with warmth and humanity, even by those who were already fed up with Americans.
Anderson gives a more dramatic example, coming from an Iraqi named Muslih, whom he meets as supplies are being collected for Fallujah at the Mother of All Battles Mosque outside Baghdad. Muslih was educated in the United States in the 1970s, but he launches into a predictable diatribe against Americans' humiliations of Iraqis, their role as a tool of Israel, and so on. But then he adds, "You know, there are those of us who don't want the Americans to leave so quickly, but they should behave."
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