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."
