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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
When Anderson tells a weeping Iraqi doctor treating the briefly famous child burn victim, Ali, "So it's untrue what they say about doctors being able to suspend their emotions," I wasn't sure if Anderson realized that this inappropriate response was his own defense against his sadness. His driver, Sabah, kisses a photo of the two of them together and says they are good friends, but Anderson only comments that it was an argument "which I found hard to disagree with." Surely he should be able to tell us how he feels about Sabah, but what we get is a condescending description of his routines and "pidgin English" that felt cruel to me.
I have the sense that Anderson is a decent person, and that he likes Iraqis, but that he isn't quite aware why. I suspect it is for the same reason that most of us foreigners do, a reason that requires some self-scrutiny. We love Iraq, and Iraqis, not in spite of the fact that they are broken, but because of it. We enjoy being able to feel compassion, empathy and tenderness toward our fellow man, but in a self-contained environment where we can always walk away. This is not a condemnation, or if it is, it's one I apply to myself. But I've come to believe it's behind many an infatuation with the Third World.
Anderson's lack of sensibility, emotional and aesthetic, looms large because this isn't a book in which much happens. As one of the 16 foreign reporters who remained in Baghdad during the American bombing campaign, Anderson was cut off from knowledge of the war. His sleep was shattered by the nightly bombardments, but Iraqi television and the press conferences run by the notoriously in-denial Mohammed Al Sahaf ignored the American advances until they were literally inside Baghdad. Then, on the morning of April 7, 2003, Anderson spotted American soldiers across the Tigris from his room at the Sheraton, and knew the end had come. When Anderson returns to Iraq in late June and chonicles the beginnings of the insurgency in the book's last 60 pages, the action picks up, but until then, his project succeeds or fails based on his ability to convey the human dimension of the war.
The clumsiness of his writing doesn't help. Too often, Anderson approaches the English language as a blunt instrument that he must wrestle with -- sometimes unsuccessfully -- to make his point. I'd noticed this in his turgid biography of Che Guevara, which I threw down as unreadable after the first couple of hundred pages, but it is less obvious in his magazine articles for the New Yorker. It's back again here, along with a crying need for a thesaurus, and a second draft: "One man came past me carrying a wasted-looking young man, perhaps his brother, who looked to be near death. A couple of old men came past, looking completely lost ..."
The writing gets better as the book progresses, but there are bad patches even in the faster-moving last pages. Anderson describes "armed, turbanned men, most of them masked with keffiyahs and wearing the trademark black turban of the Mahdi Army. They had the nervous energy and furtive movements of feral creatures, and looked a bit wild." Must Anderson tell us that turbanned men are wearing turbans, that feral creatures are wild, or that Iraqi prison guards "ran around waving and yelling in Arabic," as though they might plausibly have been speaking Spanish or Japanese?
I also found it maddening that Anderson's blow-by-blow of the war gives us the day of the week, but not the date. Anyone who followed the war closely has an idea of what happened on April 7, 8 or 9, but not on Tueday, Wednesday or Thursday. "On Wednesday morning, I went outside to find out what was happening" may sound more "literary" to Anderson, but it is just obtuse.
More seriously, Anderson takes a lot of what people tell him at face value. Many of his Baathist acquaintances say that at least Saddam was not an Islamist, but in recent decades Saddam had reinstituted many elements of Sharia law in Iraq, including the prohibition on women traveling without a male guardian. He also removed all but the most token penalties for honor killings. Nor does Anderson have much interest in the Shiites; his obligatory interviews with clerics are so perfunctory that they might as well have been omitted.
Anderson's best lines are his last: "A year after the fall of Baghdad, it seemed as if the city had not really fallen at all. Or, perhaps it was still falling." It will probably be falling for many years to come, as long as it takes for a generation to grow up that has not known a totalitarian society. And the Iraqis are no longer just broken, they are trying to break us, too. Anderson came to Iraq for a good reason, but he was unable to see that the most interesting thing about Saddam was not specific to Iraq: It was what his rule showed us about human beings in general.
