What went wrong

In Anthony Shadid's extraordinary new book about the Iraq war, the Iraqis themselves finally speak. Their stories provide the most eloquent indictment yet of America's disastrous Middle East adventure.

By Gary Kamiya

Sep 13, 2005 | The U.S. government, its military, its press and its people have operated in ignorance of Iraq from the beginning. The United States invaded Iraq blindly, occupied it blindly and is now blindly trying to find a way to escape. In this darkness, the publication of Anthony Shadid's "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" is an important event, a ray of light. This is the first book about the Iraq war to tell the Iraqi side of the story. It is painful and necessary reading.

Shadid, a reporter for the Washington Post, takes readers into the homes, and minds, of Iraqis of every stripe -- from a Baghdad doctor who loves America but has no idea why America wants to invade his "pathetic" country to an impoverished single mother trying to feed her eight children; from a government minder who ends up becoming Shadid's best Iraqi fixer -- and friend -- to a devoutly religious young peasant who resolves to die fighting the occupiers. Informed, scrupulously observed, elegantly written and deeply compassionate, "Night Draws Near" is a classic not just of war reporting but of what we might call frontline anthropology. Although it takes no sides and expresses no partisan opinions, Shadid's book may be the most damning indictment yet of the Iraq war.

An Arab-American of Lebanese descent who speaks fluent Arabic and has reported from the Middle East for 10 years, Shadid was able to penetrate deeper into Iraqi society during the war period than any other reporter I know of. Most Western reporters in Iraq speak little or no Arabic and have to learn Arab and Iraqi culture from scratch. Furthermore, few of them have developed long and intimate relations with ordinary Iraqis, which can result in clichés, wooden statements devoid of nuance, or interviews in which the suspicion arises that the source is simply telling the reporter what he thinks he wants to hear. Because Shadid was able to develop long-term relationships and friendships with many sources, he was able not only to penetrate beneath the surface but to capture how Iraqis' feelings about the Americans evolved over time. (They did not grow fonder of us.)

But perhaps even more important than his skilled and intrepid reporting, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is Shadid's combination of open-mindedness and sophistication, his willingness to simply listen to what Iraqis say and report it with rare understanding. Perhaps because of his ethnic background, Shadid does not exoticize his subjects. From a perspective that combines journalism and anthropology, he has a deep enough knowledge of Iraqis' culture, political beliefs and religion to understand them and convey their shared humanity, but he is not so far inside their worldview that he loses all critical perspective. Seen through his eyes, a devout young man in Fallujah preparing to fight the Americans is neither a cartoon "Islamofascist" -- the right-wing version -- nor a cartoon revolutionary fighting the righteous fight against American imperialism, the far-left version. Rather he is something much easier and harder to understand: a Sunni Arab at a certain place and time, the product of history yet a free individual, at once familiar and strange.

If the architects of this disastrous war had tried to grasp these complexities, and how they might play out in Iraqis' reaction to the invasion, we might not find ourselves in our current plight. (To be sure, those on the radical left should have listened, too. The consequences of their failure to do so, however, were somewhat less significant. The failures of the right led to a calamitous war; the failures of the left led to bombast from the likes of International ANSWER.)

Most of the events in "Night Draws Near" take place between March 2003, when Shadid arrived in Iraq weeks before the invasion, and June 2004, when he left. In the book's prologue, however, he recounts an event he witnessed in 2002, when Saddam Hussein, facing invasion and attempting to rally popular support, suddenly released all of Iraq's untold thousands of prisoners. Shadid was present at Saddam's largest and most notorious prison, Abu Ghraib, when the prisoners emerged, in a wild eruption of joy, furtive rage at Saddam, increasingly bold calls for justice and emotional hysteria. "In the cathartic scenes that followed -- moments unparalleled in Iraq's history, perhaps in any history -- the hidden complexity of a country we knew only by its surface played out before us," Shadid writes. "The powerful forces we saw fermenting beneath the veneer of absolutism would reappear, five months later, during the aftermath of the American invasion and Saddam's fall." Those fermenting forces included some that Americans expected -- joy at liberation, anger at Saddam -- but others were more unpredictable.

Shadid speaks of the "combustible ambiguities of Iraq -- the ancient pride, the desire for justice, the resilience" that "were emerging from beneath the fear, conformity and silence" of Saddam's long rule. He never articulates exactly what it was he witnessed that day at Abu Ghraib that ran counter to America's received images of who Iraqis were and how they were going to behave. Certainly the behavior he describes on that day, however chaotic, was not as disconcerting to American assumptions as the later massive Iraqi rejection of the occupation and the nearly universal lack of gratitude for being freed from Saddam. His point is larger, more rooted in the dark byways of history: Iraq was a strange and culturally alien country and people, with an inconceivably long history and a long list of grievances against the United States and the West. It was arrogant folly for Americans to think they could predict the outcome of invading such a place, of trying to change the course of history. "When the Americans arrived, its soldiers, diplomats and aid workers marched into an antique land built on layer upon layer of history, a terrain littered with wars, marked by scars, seething with grievances and ambitions," Shadid writes. "Willingly or not, they added their own chapter to this chronicle. The Americans came as liberators and became occupiers; but, most important, they served as a catalyst for consequences they never foresaw."

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