What went wrong

One of the more peculiar ironies of the Bush administration's case for war is that its officials, anxious to appear as enlightened, post-colonial liberators, refused to acknowledge the vast cultural and religious differences between Iraq and the U.S. and the problems those could create in installing democracy there. Take Iraq's tribes, with their fierce ethic of loyalty and honor. Of the most chilling episodes in "Night Draws Near" is one concerning the aftermath of an American raid in the Sunni triangle that killed three people. After the raid, an Iraqi informer walked among detainees, pointing them out to U.S. troops. Despite being disguised with a bag over his head, the informer was recognized by his fellow villagers by his yellow sandals and his amputated thumb. His name was Sabah. The town, Thuluyah, seethed with rage: Sabah had violated the unforgiving tribal code.

When Shadid asked some villagers what would happen to Sabah, he was greeted with stony silence -- men belonging to different tribes, potential enemies if the matter turned into a vendetta, were present and no one wanted to discuss it. Trying to be polite, one man softly whispered to Shadid, "Of course he'll be killed, but not yet." When Sabah fled, relatives of two of the men killed in the raid gave Sabah's family a choice: "Either they kill Sabah, or villagers would murder the rest of his family." That could set off a vendetta that might last for years.

Sabah's brother and uncle brought Sabah back to Thuluyah. The next day, his father and brother, carrying AK-47s, entered his room before dawn and took him behind the house. With trembling hands, the father fired twice. Shot through the leg and the torso, Sabah fell, still breathing. Some witnesses told Shadid that the father collapsed. Sabah's brother then fired three times, once at his brother's head, killing him.

Sitting with the father later, Shadid found himself unable to ask the question he knew that as a journalist he had to ask: Had he killed his son? "In a moment so tragic, so wretched, there still had to be decency. I didn't want to hear him say yes. I didn't want to humiliate him any further. In the end, I didn't have to."

"'I have the heart of a father, and he's my son,' he told me, his eyes cast to the ground. 'Even the prophet Abraham didn't have to kill his son.' He stopped, steadying his voice. 'There was no other choice.'"

(After Shadid's account of the killing appeared in the Washington Post, the U.S. military began searching for the father. In a speech Shadid gave in July 2004, he said the man was still in hiding, protected by his fellow villagers.)

Possibly the most poignant of Shadid's tales takes place far below such grand geostrategic concerns. It is the story of Karima Salman and her family. Karima, a desperately poor mother of eight, lived in a squalid, cockroach-infested apartment in Baghdad. The first story Shadid tells about her takes place before the war. Most of her family and friends had already fled Baghdad. She was exhausted, lonely, unable to pay the rent, faced with skyrocketing food prices. Her 21-year-old son, Ali, who had been working as a plumber, had been sent north days earlier to man an antiaircraft battery.

At their parting, movingly recounted by Shadid, Karima and Ali simply exchanged the basic phrases of Islam. "There is no God but God," she told Ali as he boarded a bus. "Muhammad is the messenger of God," Ali replied, completing the phrase. Her final words to him were prayers of farewell: "God be with you. God protect you." As she recounted their parting, tears ran down her cheeks. "A mother's heart rests on her son's heart," she told Shadid. "Every hour, I cry for him."

"Faith for Karima and her family was not a matter of religious zealotry," Shadid writes. "It was not even piety, really. It gave their lives cadence ... It spoke with clarity, offered simplicity, and served as a familiar refuge in troubled times." As Karima sat with her five daughters on old mattresses on a tile floor and waited for the war to begin, "in her voice was the hopelessness that forced so many in the once-proud city to put their faith and future in God's hands. 'We only have God,' she told me. 'Thanks be to him' ... To Karima, the war that had begun was a play; on its grand stage, people were mere actors. 'Life's not good, it's not bad,' she told me, as we sipped the bitter coffee. 'It's just a play.'"

The fate of small people like Karima and her family, unknown, of no political consequence, is easy to forget as nations rush to war and powerful men plan and redraw maps. "Ordinary people are, as Karima recognized, only pawns on a giant board; if one or one thousand of them are swept off, no one notices." It is one of the functions of journalism, perhaps the noblest, simply to bear witness to these forgotten ones.

Karima's daughter Amal, about to turn 14, kept a diary during the bombing, invasion and occupation. In it, Shadid writes, "Amal never spoke of the war in political terms. There was only a young girl who did not understand why people were dying. Death in itself was wrong, whoever the victim; angry, she could see no justification." Looking at images of dead GIs, Amal wrote, "Why? What's the fault of those soldiers who were killed? What's the fault of the families of the dead, or their mothers, who must be crying over their sons? Why is this war happening? ... I saw on TV the injured in the south. I saw dead children, one without a hand, it was cut off. They were five or six years old, and the young men were aged 16 or 17, injured in their legs. How were they at fault? Why is there fighting? Oh God, have mercy on our dead."

As time goes on, Amal's voice grows surer, her questions deeper. "Her questions and her search for meaning were a measure of her own emerging freedom," Shadid writes. Amal's diary runs like a moving threnody throughout the book, heartbreaking and yet, in its portrayal of an innocent young girl coming of age, offering a ray of hope that crosses all boundaries.

Next Page: "Perhaps history condemned the project from the start"

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