The Washington Post News Articles
Webb Reviews:
NIGHT DRAWS NEAR
September 11, 2005
Author interview, book excerpts and photos on washingtonpost.com
The 2003 invasion of
Iraq and its consequences owe more to the insistent saber-rattling
of the removed, intellectual classes than any other war in American
history. That so many leaders and commentators now coldly politicize
what is, at bottom, a visceral and powerfully emotional experience
for those on the receiving end of our invasion has magnified the
inability of many Americans to understand the differences between
the Bush administration's aspirations and Iraq's realities. It also
has depersonalized the Iraqi people in many eyes and fed the irony
of the rhetoric from those who claim that Iraqi resistance is driven
simply by the fear and hatred of the "freedom" America has brought
them. The U.S. leadership views the attempt to overhaul Iraq as
power politics, designed to remake an entire region. Most Iraqis, by
contrast, measure the invasion and occupation through its impact on
diverse cultural forces, strongly held local traditions and a long
history of other invasions and occupations.
Enter Anthony Shadid, a Washington Post reporter whose book Night
Draws Near gives us -- perhaps for the first time -- a clear
understanding of how and why the Iraqi people have reacted to the
American invasion and occupation of their country.
An Oklahoma-born American of Lebanese descent, Shadid has already
earned a slew of journalistic awards for his work in Iraq, including
the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Indeed, one
strains to think of any other person who would be able to combine
the same elements of ethnic background, American upbringing,
scholarly ability and long experience in the region in order to
flesh out the cultural, historical and political framework of the
Iraq war.
Reporting with great freedom of movement and without being embedded
in a U.S. military unit, Shadid covered the entire period from
before the invasion to events following Iraq's January elections.
The Arabic-speaking Shadid walks us through Iraq, giving us a set of
eyes with which to gauge the country for ourselves. Some of this is
"grunt reporting," where Shadid witnesses many of the country's more
gruesome catastrophes, both during and after the initial fighting
that toppled the Baath regime. Much of the book is almost
novelistic; he introduces Iraqis of widely varying beliefs and
backgrounds, revisiting many of them several times from the American
invasion to the period following the 2004 battles in Najaf and
Fallujah, thus allowing us to see experience through their eyes. Now
and then, we are treated to historical essays that provide a vital
backdrop to understanding just how the Iraqis view the Americans --
and, indeed, each other. In high journalistic fashion, rarely does
Shadid cross the line between reporting and personal opinion,
especially political opinion.
Throughout all of this, one gets a sense that Shadid, perhaps
uniquely among American journalists, knows how to operate in that
difficult and often dangerous environment. His Arab background and
mastery of the language no doubt helped him move about and get
Iraqis to talk openly. His affection for the region and its people
is palpable. And in addition, he navigated many intricacies with the
help of his erstwhile Iraqi government handler, whom Shadid decided
to retain as a trusted employee after Saddam Hussein's fall. The two
became great friends. One wonders what might have happened if
American authorities had taken such an approach after the invasion,
cultivating the best and brightest from among the old regime rather
than banishing Baath Party members from further government service.
Several themes resonate throughout the book, many of which should
give pause to adherents of the narrow political orthodoxy that seems
to define so much of the U.S. debate and analysis of Iraq. American
commentators often begin their discussions with the premise that the
Baath era was a uniquely monstrous period in Iraqi history. Few
Iraqis look back to that period with fondness, but as time passes,
many of them lament the loss of order that came with the
dictatorship, in contrast to the murderous chaos that defines the
occupation.
Indeed, few Americans grasp how deeply Iraqis feel their own
history, or how fiercely they have always resisted foreign
occupation. "The last four centuries were hell," one burly, aging
Iraqi academic says to Shadid. "Despotic, tyrannical, bloody
regimes, and most of them were foreign." We learn that President
Bush's promise that the U.S. military would arrive in Iraq not as
conquerors but as liberators was virtually identical to the words
British Maj. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude used in 1917 ("Our armies do not
come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as
liberators"), when Britain began a decades-long occupation during
World War I, defeated the Ottoman Turks and took control of Iraq's
oil. "It's a long story, the history of Iraq," a Baghdad
restaurateur told Shadid, without apparent irony.
Not surprisingly, Shadid shows us a U.S. administration that has
locked itself away from the violence and frequent hostility that
rumble outside the "palm-shrouded, formerly manicured villas and
palaces" of what has come to be known as the Green Zone. The
Coalition Provisional Authority's largely Republican and painfully
inexperienced staff was "drawn from the ranks of Washington
lobbyists, congressional staffers, policy enthusiasts and the
public-relations specialists less charitably known as flaks," Shadid
notes. "Most of the staffers so rarely emerged from the [Green Zone]
. . . that they had no notion of what was going on in the country
they were supposed to rule. . . . The Green Zone was truly a world
unto itself."
Shadid breaks new ground in offering us a much-needed look at the
human face of the Iraqi people, as well as an acute analysis of the
variegated cultural and historical forces that ultimately are going
to decide the political fate of Iraq. In one gruesome but
illuminating scene, we see a father being forced by angry fellow
villagers to kill his own son, who had turned into an informer for
the Americans, lest failure to do so set off years of "blood-soaked
vendettas." Whatever an American politician may wish to make of this
event, it graphically debunks the notion that resistance to the
American occupation has been merely the work of "dead-enders" or
"foreign terrorists." As Shadid points out, in Sunni regions "tribal
authority had grown in the wake of the government's fall . . .
tribal code stipulated a brutal frontier justice, which had come to
fill a lawless void. This code, rigorous and unforgiving, was
paramount."
Indeed, through Shadid's eyes, we see clearly the chasm between
occupier and occupied -- a rift that runs far deeper than the usual
ethnic divisions between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that dominate
U.S. debates about the country's future. "The Americans in Baghdad
framed the tumult in Iraq from the perspective of their own heritage
and expressed them in the familiar vocabulary of democratic ideals,"
he writes. "They had come as liberators." But the Iraqis' own
"vocabulary was shaped less by a reflexive celebration of democracy
and freedom and more by their own religion, nationalism, and
material circumstance." For Iraqis, "justice" trumps "freedom." Most
important, for Shadid's interlocutors, legitimacy is the key to
future Iraqi politics, pitting the Americans' Westernized
constitutional scheme against less formal structures based on
religion and tribal leadership. "The Americans never understood the
question; Iraqis never agreed on the answer," Shadid writes. "Who
had the right to rule? As important to Iraqis was the question of
where that right came from -- God, the gun, money, law, tradition?"
Visiting Fallujah, he surveyed "the virtual incomprehension between
ruler and ruled, staring across a religious divide." The custodian
of a local mosque told him, "We don't accept humiliation and we
don't accept colonialism." A teacher added, "We've exchanged a
tyrant for an occupier."
In analyzing the ethnic debate, Shadid gives us historical and
cultural insights that often differ with prevailing views. While
most political analysts tend to lump Iraqis together as Shiites,
Sunnis or Kurds, his careful examination of the differences between
the Shiite factions led by the upstart cleric Moqtada Sadr and the
country's most important political figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, is essential reading. And while the American political and
military focus over the past two years has been the defeat of the
Sunni-dominated insurgency, Shadid is one of the few writers to show
the almost unbelievable strategic mousetrap playing itself out as
the Shiites -- less secular and more susceptible to the influence of
Iran -- step ever closer to the prize of national dominance.
Mixed in with such fresh, hard-won insights are passages that
combine acute reporting skills and novelistic phrasing, giving the
reader a true sense of people and place. During the battle for
Baghdad, Shadid noticed "the buses that still, spectacularly, ran
their routes, even during the most pitched fighting on the capital's
streets." And after a gruesome bombing in Najaf that killed more
than 80 people near a Shiite shrine, "the wood stalls lay splintered
in blackened pools of grime and blood mixed with charred metal and
brick. Along one sidewalk, men sifted with their hands through
shards of glass for silver rings blown from their display cases."
Night Draws Near has only two weaknesses. The first is that its
reporting on the Kurds is not as comprehensive as its treatment of
other groups. The second is unavoidable: The book lacks a
retrospective that would sum up the entirety of this chapter in
Iraqi history, for the simple reason that the situation continues to
evolve so unpredictably. But as a piece of reporting on the forces
that are shaping today's Iraq, this is as fine a book as one could
hope to read.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS