As Iraqis go to the polls this week to vote on a new if imperfect constitution, Americans ponder at which point the “liberation” went so terribly wrong. If there is one thing Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid makes clear, it’s that the answer is a complex one, requiring a deep understanding of Iraq’s conflicted history.
In his new book, “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” the Oklahoma-born Lebanese American recounts his days in Baghdad as an embedded reporter of a different kind, telling the stories of regular Iraqis from several weeks before the invasion through the insurgency that continues to last long after.
“Even if, against the odds, Iraqis manage to avert worse violence, history will still condemn America for its blundering in their country,” the hawkish and ardently pro-war Economist magazine wrote in a September review of Shadid’s book. “Mr. Shadid lists the mistakes dispassionately, including those well known — the insufficient number of occupying troops, the disbanding of Iraq’s security forces — and those less advertised, that the Sadrist uprising began after an American helicopter rammed a sacred Shia flag for fun, or that the resistance in Fallujah began after American troops there massacred 15 unarmed protesters.”
Sadid’s strength is not his geopolitical ruminations — which are few and far between — but his ability to show the war through the eyes of ordinary civilians. With his fluent mastery of Arabic, Shadid recounts the stories gleaned through casual conversations over sweetened tea, painting a picture of a country devastated by decades — perhaps centuries — of seemingly never-ending wars, one whose deep pride leaves it reluctant to choose between a mad dictator on one hand and a foreign occupier on another.
In an art gallery, Shadid talks to a local artist, who recounts how a combination of Saddam Hussein’s follies and United Nations sanctions has eaten away at the proud history of Baghdad, once the intellectual capital of the Arab world. Shadid asks him about one of President George W. Bush’s speeches: “The day of your liberation is near.”
“They’re going to burn the forest to kill the fox,” the artist replies, smiling. “That’s my idea.”
The book has no protagonist, and Shadid avoids simplistic narratives that attempt to demonize one side and lay praise on another. In one of many ironies, he recounts an unexpected friendship with Nasir Mehdawi, an Information Ministry “minder” assigned to be Shadid’s government escort.
“I’m a drunkard but I still have faith in God,” Mehdawi confesses, describing half of the people they meet as “fucking assholes” and the rest as “army deserters.”
In a middle-class Baghdad home of a former Iraqi diplomat, Shadid joins the Sunni family for lunch. With Fox News playing in the background, the diplomat, Faruq Ahmed Saadeddlin, parrots Bush’s with-us-or-against-us speech.
“You have a problem,” Faruq says. “You don’t understand.”
That theme reappears throughout the book, as Shadid attempts to show how America’s simplistic understanding of Iraq’s history and ethnic makeup has left America unprepared to handle the war’s aftermath.
Everyone in Baghdad remembers a line from Maj. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, Shadid explains, a British commander who arrived in 1917 to free Iraq from the Ottoman Empire.
“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators,” he proclaimed.
The British remained to rule for decades.
The similarities may not stop there. The British Empire collapsed a generation ago, and Iraq, which it was never able to master, continues chugging along, in the same tragic and conflicted way. America, Shadid suggests, may have much to learn.
