A Harrowing Portrait of Life in Postwar Iraq
Mad Mambo Master of Macedonia
A Harrowing Portrait of Life in Postwar Iraq
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In an incisive and eloquent new book, the Washington Post reporter
Anthony Shadid tells the story of a man named Sabah, who is accused of
being a United States informer in the town of Thuluyah. Sabah is blamed
by villagers for the deaths of a teenager and two men in an American
raid, and his case becomes a matter of tribal justice: relatives of the
dead men make it clear to Sabah's relatives that "either they kill Sabah,
or villagers would murder the rest of his family." According to Mr.
Shadid, Sabah's father and brother, carrying AK-47's, take him out to
their backyard orchard and take aim and fire. "Even the prophet Abraham
didn't have to kill his son," the father later tells Mr. Shadid, sadly
adding that in his case "there was no other choice."
Sabah's story is only one of many tragic stories to be found in "Night
Draws Near," a book that gives a harrowing portrait of life in postwar
Iraq and the fallout that the American war has had on ordinary Iraqi
civilians, from a 14-year-old girl coping with the bombing of Baghdad to
a 62-year-old academic and former Baath Party member to the reporter's
own "fixer" and government minder, Nasir Mehdawi , who would later became
a colleague and friend.
The volume draws heavily upon Mr. Shadid's reporting for The Washington
Post. (His dispatches from Iraq won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting.) It leaves the reader with a devastating sense
of the gap between the war's aims and its aftermath and the gap between
the administration's rhetoric and the realities on the ground. Though
much of the factual material in the book will be familiar to dedicated
newspaper readers, Mr. Shadid does a fluent job of pulling all this
information into a riveting narrative that is animated by his up-close
and personal portraits of individual Iraqis. At the same time "Night
Draws Near" - much like Larry Diamond's book "Squandered Victory," which
appeared this summer - also provides a damning account of the Bush
administration's failure to prepare adequately for the postwar occupation
of Iraq, and of its missteps and miscalculations in the wake of toppling
Saddam Hussein.
"There was never really a plan for post-Saddam Iraq," Mr. Shadid 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."
Trusting Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi and believing "their own
rhetoric of liberation," he argues, United States officials naïvely
assumed that "everything would fall into place after Saddam's
departure." As a result too few troops were committed to secure the
victory, and looting, score-settling and lawlessness followed. Even
months after the collapse of Mr. Hussein's regime, many Iraqis were still
lacking basic services like electricity and water; food prices and
unemployment had soared; and daily life for many had turned into a
hazardous minefield.
The political consequences of the continuing violence would be severe, as
Mr. Shadid's sources attest. Even many of those Iraqis who were joyous at
Mr. Hussein's fall and who were prepared to think the best of the
Americans began to question the failure of the United States, the most
powerful nation on the face of the earth, to establish order. As Mr.
Shadid puts it, "Saddam had ruled for 35 years, the Americans had toppled
him in less than three weeks, and relatively few of their soldiers and
died in the task. How could these same Americans be so feeble in the
aftermath?"
As the weeks of violence turned into months, frustration turned to
bitterness and resentment at what was perceived by many Iraqis as
"malicious inattention or inattentive malice" on the part of the United
States. Memories of the Reagan administration's support for Mr. Hussein's
government during the Iran-Iraq war resurfaced, as well as grievances
over the American-supported sanctions that took such a toll on the
civilians. "God Curse Saddam and the Americans" became a popular
graffiti. One man Mr. Shadid interviewed even asserted that Mr. Hussein
had been in cahoots with the Americans, giving them a pretext to occupy
Iraq: "My expectation is that Saddam Hussein is in the United States on
an island. They'll build a monument for him because he made their mission
easy."
Matters were not helped by the formal United Nations declaration in May
2003 granting the United States and Britain formal authority as occupying
powers in Iraq. "For many Americans, even Europeans, the term
'occupation' probably evokes the aftermath of World War II and an
American-led vision of cooperation with like-minded peoples forging a
common destiny," writes Mr. Shadid, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent.
"But for Iraqis, and for most Arabs, the term, seared into the collective
memory, brings to mind Israel's record in the Middle East" - namely, the
Israeli occupation of Lebanon and, more pointedly, the region's most
incendiary issue, Palestine.
Indeed, as the months passed and Mr. Shadid continued his travels through
the volatile streets of Baghdad and the even more volatile streets of
smaller towns and villages, he witnessed the seeds of the insurgency
blossom and take root in widening sectors of the population. Given the
power vacuum created by the fall of a government that had held sway for
decades and the United States' decision to dissolve the Iraqi army,
vociferous religious leaders like Muqtada Sadr stepped forward, and
disparate groups (including former supporters of Saddam, Iraqi
nationalists, radical Islamists and foreign agitators) started to come
together under the banner of resistance.
"Rather than Iraq changing the Arab world" as American leaders had hoped,
Mr. Shadid writes of the summer of 2003, "the Arab world, with its
complement of impressions, prejudices, aspirations, and resentments,
began changing Iraq. As time passed, towns in the Sunni regions began to
feel more and more recognizable to reporters like me who had spent years
in Arab places. I perceived a new surge of anger after each new catalyst:
a shooting deemed unprovoked, a search considered unjustified, or a raid
viewed as unwarranted. In three towns that summer - Heet, Fallujah, and
Khaldiya - I would hear an Iraqi proverb repeated over and over as the
occupation lurched on, violence of all kinds escalated, and more Iraqis
were killed: 'The mud is getting wetter,' the people said. Things are
getting worse, it meant."
Mr. Shadid sees the elections that took place in January as a sign of
hope - a sign that some Iraqis are tenaciously refusing "to surrender
their country to the forces of violence and chaos." But he points out
that after those elections, the "forces of religious revival, growing
militancy, and hardening sectarianism, underlined by grievance and a
threat of even more strife, returned to the stage." He reports that Iraqi
police and security forces are often denounced as collaborators or
traitors, that Iraqi society is growing increasingly atomized with "many
fair-minded, conscientious people" withdrawing behind iron gates or
choosing actual exile, and that "in the pantheon of hallowed struggles,
Iraq had now joined Palestine and Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia, all
countries where a besieged Muslim population was pitted against a more
powerful foe."
For ordinary Iraqis - who lived through the repressive regime of Saddam
Hussein, the harrowing losses of the Iran-Iraq war, the ravages of the
Persian Gulf war of 1991 and the hardships of international sanctions -
the 2003 invasion by America and the continuing insurgency represent yet
another chapter in what seems like a Sisyphean litany of suffering.
As for the unrelenting suicide attacks and car bombs, Mr. Shadid writes
near the end of this sobering and revealing book: "Bloodshed in itself
was the ambition; it was a brutal, chilling, but calculated way to
produce the perception of American failure" and "they succeeded, with
cold brilliance, in magnifying the sense of U.S. failure in the eyes of
most Iraqis and, for that matter, in the eyes of much of the world."
"It was theater," he goes on, "and people kept dying to create those
indelible scenes, a portrait of a debacle designed for world consumption.
The carnage itself sent the message of approaching anarchy, of the
nearing of an abyss, as if it was understood that Americans could say
nothing to mitigate the most recent tragedies or promise anything that
would end the violence. The country was neither liberated, as Americans
would have it, nor occupied, as the rest of the Arab world saw it. Iraq
was subsumed in the logic of violence, ruled by men with guns."