What went wrong

Like virtually everyone who observed the post-invasion period, Shadid lays much of the blame for the disaster on the Bush administration's total failure to plan for the day after. "There was never really a plan for post-Saddam Iraq," he writes. "There was never a realistic view of what might ensue after the fall. There was hope that became faith, and delusions that became fatal." But Shadid goes beyond generalities to reveal how that failure actually impacted ordinary Iraqis.

The fortunes of the Salman family reflect the general collapse of Iraqi life under the occupation, a degeneration that was probably the most decisive practical factor in leading Iraqis to turn against the United States. The U.S. was never able to restore electricity and water to their prewar levels, which led many Iraqis, who thought of the U.S. as omnipotent after its lightning-quick military victory, to believe that the failure was intentional. (Shadid points out that it did not help that everyone remembered that Saddam was able to get the power more or less back within two months after the first Gulf War.) Having no power is no small matter in a country cursed with one of the most brutal summer climates on earth: As Amal tries to write in her diary, sweat pouring down onto the page during yet another interminable outage, her feet swollen from carrying buckets of water up several stories from the street, you can feel the whole country slipping away from the Americans, drop by drop.

Then there was the shocking, sickening collapse of security, which Shadid chronicles: Someone attempts to kidnap Amal and her sister; a thief pulls a man from his car at a market and shoots him for his satellite phone while a crowd of bystanders does nothing; a professor is riddled with bullets for no known reason. As Shadid puts it, "The looting had diminished but it was like a knife dragged across the city, digging wounds that would never heal."

Less well known than the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and its security was the demise of simple civility, of the bonds that bound people together. While during the bombing the Salman family's neighbors helped them, a few months later, "all vestiges of this mutuality had by now disappeared; the crisis had gone on so long. The civility and solidarity that Karima and her family recalled from the invasion were nowhere to be found among their fellow Baghdadis. Now reigned confusion, chaos, and most often, pettiness. The same families who had prayed with them in war, creating bonds that had not before existed, refused to help Karima and her family hijack electricity from other buildings. At times, Karima's was the only apartment in the building that couldn't secure an electrical connection. The family had to sit in the dimly lit hallway if they wanted light." When Karima asked the family of her late husband's sister for money for food and rent, the family fought her and tried to get U.S. soldiers to arrest her.

The last story Shadid tells about the Salman family takes place a year after the invasion. Karima has found work as a maid at a hotel, taking home $33 a month. Ali made it home safely after deserting from the army; he found work serving tea in a real estate office, making about a dollar a day. As for Amal, she has grown confident enough to criticize both Saddam and the Americans. (Shadid points out the irony of the fact that it was the American invasion that made it possible for Amal to criticize the occupiers.) "If I say the Americans are better, someone asks, What have the Americans done? What have they done for us? All the Americans have done is bring the tanks," she tells Shadid. "If I said the time of Saddam was better, they say, What? If he didn't like you, he would cut off your head. He was a tyrant. I don't know what to say."

A few days later, Shadid returns and Amal continues their conversation. After opining that no government, Arab or foreign, is just, that all rulers are both good and bad, she adds, "There must be hope. Even the Quran says we must be optimistic. If you hope, you can get an answer. If you study more, you will find more success. If you have more hope, you can be assured of more and more progress. If not for my generation, then the generation that's coming."

After which Karima says softly to Shadid, "They're still young. They don't know what's ahead."

What lay ahead, we now know, was even worse. Shadid left in June 2004, returning in January 2005 to cover the elections. The window of hope offered by the elections quickly closed as Iraq descended into a hell of sectarian violence and insurgent attacks. Considering how bad the situation was even in the summer of 2004, it's hard to believe that Iraqis, despite their storied toughness, have not since suffered a collective nervous breakdown.

"Night Draws Near" does not assign blame for the ongoing tragedy in Iraq. Nor does Shadid attempt to compare the lives of Iraqis under Saddam with the lives of those under the U.S. occupation -- although many of his sources tell him that things are far worse under the Americans than under Saddam, and few if any say the opposite. In the largest sense, it is axiomatic that America is responsible for everything that has happened to Iraq since the invasion. But were the Iraqi people themselves partly responsible for their fate as well?

Shadid quotes several Iraqis who say that Saddam, with his endless wars and brutality, destroyed the Iraqi soul and spirit. Others say that Iraq needs a strongman to lead it, that it is simply not suited for democracy. What is indisputable is that over the years, Iraqis had become dependent on a Stalinist bureaucracy. "Some of the less charitable [Americans] grew angry at people they characterized as unprepared to help themselves," Shadid notes. "There was, of course, an element of truth in this. Iraqi society was battered and beaten down by wars and dictatorship. Sometimes it seemed that the initiative of Iraqis had been entirely vitiated by Saddam's government, which didn't sanction resourcefulness or originality and which fostered a dependency that many in Iraq were willing to embrace ... The U.S. administration may have complained that the Iraqis expected too much too soon, given the state of the country, the resources at hand and the challenges inherent in a postwar environment. But the Americans had to take, or at least share, responsibility for raising the people's expectations in the first place ... When [President Bush] promised that 'the life of the Iraqi citizen is going to dramatically improve,' his words were not forgotten. One of those who remembered was young Amal:

"'Please, tell us, when are we going to live a life of security and stability? Listen to us, hear us, you people out there, we have cried and shouted. What else can we do? ... They talk about democracy. Where is democracy? Is it that people die of hunger and deprivation and fear? Is that democracy?'"

Was the American intervention doomed from the start? Or if we had made all the right decisions -- preventing looting, restoring services, not disbanding the army, treading lightly in the Sunni triangle -- could it have worked? Shadid is agnostic at best. "Another scenario for life after Saddam was perhaps possible: the ruler falls, to the joy of many; a curfew is imposed in the capital, and a provisional government is quickly constituted; basic services -- electricity, water, and sewage -- are rapidly restored; security, at times draconian, is imposed in the streets; and aid starts pouring into Baghdad, as foreign and Iraqi companies compete for the bounty of the reconstruction of a country awash in oil. The occupation might have unfolded that way -- but it didn't."

"Perhaps history condemned the project from the start," Shadid goes on. "A grim warning lay in Iraq's modern record, shaped as it was by deprivation -- Saddam's tyranny, his wars, and the expectations of Baghdadis that they deserved better. The Iraqi impression of America was no less a problem. Whatever its intentions, the United States was a non-Muslim invader in a Muslim land. For a generation, its reputation had been molded by its alliance with Israel, its record in the 1991 Gulf War, and its support for the U.N. sanctions. Not insubstantial were decades over which the United States had grown as an antagonist in the eyes of many Arabs. Iraq had long been removed from the Arab world, isolated by dictatorship, war, and the sanctions, but it remained Arab."

Observing American troops entering Baghdad for the first time, Shadid is nearly overwhelmed by the historical magnitude of what he was witnessing. In an eloquent passage, he writes, "The United States now controlled Iraq's destiny; we would now decide its fate. And we understood remarkably little about it. Deep down, I worried we would never try to know it, either. At best, we would try to force it into our construct and preconception of what a country should be. At worst, we would not care, giving in to overly emotional impressions distorted by differences in language, culture, and traditions, and by conceit. In between, the ambiguity that so defined Iraq for me -- the uncertainty, the ambivalence, the legacy of its history -- would become too complicated to unravel."

Shadid has helped us understand. Cutting through cultural and religious differences, he is able to convey the humanity of the Iraqi people. This may seem like a modest achievement, but it is in fact a major one. In an unspoken rebuke of the Clash of Civilization theorists who see cosmic gulfs between cultures and monstrous totems instead of knowable beliefs, he walks through the streets, talking and listening to people. His Iraq is a land of human beings, people who desire a decent life, who raise children and go to work and laugh and cry. They have their own religion and culture, which they do not want anyone to trample. There are fanatics and criminals among them, but they do not define who Iraqis are. Without their consent, we freed them from one nightmare only to plunge them into another one. They have suffered for far too long.

The day after Saddam fell, I wrote a piece of celebration. It concluded, "Those who opposed this war in part because they feared what it would do to the Iraqi people must now make every effort to protect and raise up those people. And to do that, they must pay attention to what is happening to them -- the good, the bad and the in-between. This is the most compelling reason to celebrate the end of Saddam. Call that celebration a leap of faith, if you will -- but you could also call it a binding contract, American to Iraqi, human heart to human heart. We smashed your country and we killed your people and we freed you from a monster: We are bound together now by blood. We owe each other, but we owe you more because we are stronger and because we came into your country."

Through inexcusable incompetence and folly, we broke that contract. We owed the Iraqi people better. "There must be hope," Amal said, and her words must not go unanswered. The tragedy is that there may no longer be any way for us to help her. The future of Iraq is unknowable, and history's judgment on America's war cannot yet be rendered. But if that judgment is harsh, we will carry the shame of it forever.

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