A review in The Economist of American journalist Anthony Shadid's account of the Iraq war, "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War," resonates with the Bush Administration's domestic failures as well as its misguided and incompetent foreign policy.
Mr Shadid writes engagingly about history and lyrically about destruction. (“The hospital ward was littered with blood-soaked gauze, the stretchers and blankets themselves bore scabs”.) He writes about the Americans in Iraq scarcely at all. The reader comes to see them almost through Iraqi eyes, as distant and dangerous, their presence expressed by absence—of electricity through a burning summer, and of security, when Baghdad is ransacked as the Baathist regime folds. Where Americans do come in, Mr Shadid prefers to let them damn themselves. Why, one startled English-speaking Iraqi asks, did the tank that advanced on his village have “We remember 9/11” written on its gun-barrel? In the Baghdad citadel, the “Green Zone”, from which America ruled Iraq, Mr Shadid encounters a breed of chirpy young Republicans, unflaggingly loyal to their government and wholly inadequate to their tasks: “Iraqis rock!” two of them tell him.
While America's leadership bragged of bringing freedom (a “catchphrase it used reflexively,” he says), Mr Shadid asks again and again the question thrown up during the 7th-century squabble between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, which has not been settled since: “Who has the right to rule, and from where does that right arise?” In the flourishing of radical Islam and nationalism after the invasion, that turned Shia and Sunni against each other and both groups against the invader, he sees a breakneck bid to supply the answer. So too in the democratic process that America and its allies hastily, if belatedly, introduced, with elections last January. Which logic will prevail, war and domination, or negotiation and compromise, Mr Shadid is careful not to try to predict.
Even if, against the odds, Iraqis manage to avert worse violence, history will still condemn America for its blundering in their country. 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.
And yet, he asks, even without all these errors, was the occupation's failure inevitable? Mr Shadid suggests that it was. Brutalised over two decades, yet still bristling with ancient pride and possessing no common idea of how their country should be, Iraqis were ripe for revolt the day the dictator's boot was lifted from their throats. And America, a well-meaning but ignorant occupier, widely distrusted across the Arab world because of its backing for Israel, was hopelessly ill-equipped to quell them. “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 sanctions, but it remained Arab.”
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