What went wrong

The views of Dr. Adel Ghaffour are typical. As the war loomed, Shadid paid a visit to Ghaffour's clinic, which he ran for mostly poor patients during off hours from his faculty job at the University of Baghdad. Ghaffour was born in Iraq but lived in America for 10 years and was married to an American woman. Like many Iraqis, Ghaffour recalled the 1970s as a golden age. "You could see that in a few years we were ready to leave the developing world," he told Shadid. "It really is a human tragedy. I doubt in history a nation has suffered like Iraq. For no good reason."

Adel was no enemy of the U.S. "'I love that country,'" Adel told me. 'If there is a paradise, it is there' ... Like others in Baghdad, he insisted that of the Arabs, the Iraqis were the most similar to the Americans -- in the way they worked, the way they lived, the way they enjoyed themselves ... His affection didn't extend to U.S. foreign policy, though. Adel, like nearly all Arabs, blamed the United States for its unswerving support for Israel, a stance that defied logic to most in the region. The support was so unrelenting, so unqualified that Adel, like many here, relied upon complicated conspiracies to explain it."

With bitter memories of a supposedly "liberating" colonial occupation and a deep distrust of America's intentions, Iraqis did not have a reservoir of goodwill to grant its new occupiers. And as Shadid learned, certain national traits did not predispose them to welcome the Americans with open arms, either.

A conversation Shadid had during the first week of the war with an educated Iraqi family revealed some of these characteristics, and presaged many of the problems to come. Shadid's friend Omar invited him to have lunch with Omar's family in their middle-class home in Baghdad. The party was made up of Omar's father, Faruq Ahmed Saadedin, an urbane former diplomat; his wife, Mona; their adult daughter, Yasmeen; and Omar's wife, Nadeen. The family was Sunni, but did not dwell on sectarian differences and regarded it as rude to bring them up -- a civilized attitude that Shadid writes was common among Baghdadis.

Despite their severely strained nerves -- the family had been kept up night after night by U.S. airstrikes, and an air raid siren sounded during Shadid's visit -- Omar's family put on a lavish traditional Iraqi lunch, over which the conversation turned to politics. Faruq, who had quit the Baath Party in 1968 (a decision he blamed for his failure to become an ambassador), dared to openly criticize Saddam as rash. "Iraq is ready for change," he said. "The people want it, they want more freedom."

For Shadid, this unusually open conversation with Omar and his family provided a crucial insight into Iraqi attitudes. "Omar and Faruq came to embody broader assumptions at work in their embattled country. Each represented currents, their depth yet unknown, that would greet U.S. soldiers on their imminent entry into Baghdad."

For Omar, "American promises of liberation were no more than rhetorical flourishes to a policy bent on domination, furthering U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East." His father was less bitter, more nuanced in his thinking: "He was no less skeptical, no less suspicious, but he saw the shades of the moment before him. Iraq was changing, and Faruq was already struggling to see the direction it would take.

"But the men converged in their denunciations of the very rationale of the American invasion," Shadid writes. "Their words reminded me of something I had long felt in Iraq. Perhaps more than any other Arab country, it seemed to dwell on traditions of pride, honor, and dignity. To Faruq and Omar, the assault was an insult. It was not Saddam under attack, but Iraq, and they insisted that pride and patriotism prevented them from putting their destiny in the hands of another country. 'We complain about things, but complaining doesn't mean cooperating with foreign governments,' Faruq said as if stating a self-evident truth. 'When somebody comes to attack Iraq, we stand up for Iraq. That doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities.'"

Not all Iraqis shared these sentiments. Fuad Musa Mohammad, a psychiatrist and a Shiite, "was the kind of Iraqi the United States had hoped to encounter once in Baghdad": He despised Saddam, loved America and welcomed the invasion. But even Fuad warned Shadid that the U.S. would have only a "perilously brief" opportunity to prove to skeptical Iraqis that its intentions were good. "'I like America, really. I like the American way of life. I like democracy and everything it offers,' he said. 'But at the same time, we don't know ... If they say, 'Okay, this is your country, we can give you all that you need, and then we'll leave,' that would be great. But when you hear that American generals are coming to govern Iraq and that it will last one year, two years, three years, six months, this view, when you explain it to simple people, the majority, that will be very difficult. They can't digest it ... They'll say, 'Who's better, Saddam or the Americans? ... At least Saddam's from the country, and they're from the outside. I may understand it,' he added, 'but the majority won't.'" By the end of the book, even Fuad has grown painfully disillusioned with the Americans.

And Fuad is decidedly in the minority, even among educated Iraqis with sophisticated political views and no particular hatred of the United States. Wamidh Nadhme is a 62-year-old professor who is able to openly criticize Saddam without having nails driven through his head because he once visited the dictator in a Cairo hospital. On the eve of the invasion, Wamidh says, "I won't hide my feelings -- the American invasion has nothing to do with democracy and human rights. It is basically an angry response to the events of Sept. 11, an angry response to the survival of Saddam Hussein, and it has something to do with oil interests in the area." A year later, when the fighting in Fallujah broke out, Wamidh "took pride in the resistance ... A man steeped in honor and dignity, he, like most Iraqis, considered the fight legitimate, even heroic."

These are the "dead-enders," the "terrorist sympathizers"? Of the Bush administration's increasingly ludicrous pronouncements about the insurgents and their sympathizers, Shadid says, "It was as if acknowledging the enemy's significance called into question America's role as a liberator." No one who reads "Night Draws Near" will be able to ever again believe the White House's simplistic fables about who is fighting us in Iraq.

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