One of the most heart-wrenching moments in Michael Moore’s powerful (and powerfully vilified) documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” was a video clip from the war in Iraq.
A woman stands before the rubble of what used to be her home, crying out in grief. She is practically smiting herself with rage, vowing revenge. Her family has been killed by a U.S. bomb. Say what one will about the way Moore marshals this image, one thing is clear: It would be impossible to quarrel with this woman’s moral authority.
A year later U.S. forces remain in Iraq, but images of suffering Iraqis have taken a back seat to another figure whose loss gives her absolute moral authority as well: Cindy Sheehan. Now that the death toll of U.S. soldiers has approached 2,000, the public is once again questioning why we are there in the first place, how long we plan to stay, and how many more lives it will take. In other words, it is a very bad time for Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near” to hit stores.
This is a shame, because Shadid’s book about the effect of this war on Iraqi people is beautifully reported, a crucial piece of context in a war where, as it turns out, context was everything. “Time and again, I am struck by how seldom I hear the word hurriya, ‘freedom,’ in conversations about politics in the Arab World,” writes Shadid in his introduction. “Much more common among Arabs is the word adil, ‘justice.”‘
Shadid was The Washington Post’s star reporter in Baghdad, and more than anything written on the war yet this book captures why Iraqis believe their sense of justice has been trampled on. For starters, as he reminds readers, the country the U.S. invaded in 2003 was no blank slate but a nation that had suffered through wars for more than 30 years. The costliest of these conflicts was the Iran-Iraq War, started by Saddam Hussein, but funded by the United States. More than a quarter million Iraqis lost their lives in that conflict alone.
Roaming the country, Shadid talks to men forced into duty for that war, some who spent a great deal of it in Iranian prisons. One of them recalls Iraqi soldiers so desperate to get home that they would step on land mines, in hopes the explosion would take just a part of their body.
“You would hear the scream,” the man says. “Whenever you heard the scream, you knew what happened. You’re lucky, Niyalak. You’re going home. Go and enjoy your life!” It’s easy to see why these veterans would want never to go to war again. But, of course, they did.
Shadid didn’t speak only to former soldiers. Born in Oklahoma of Lebanese heritage, Shadid was one of the few Arab-American writers in the Middle East who spoke Arabic, and he used his understanding of the culture to gain access to the thoughts of everyday Iraqis. He talks to newly trained police forces in the Sunni Triangle, to intellectuals, to average men and women who waited out the “shock and awe” campaign in their homes, blast waves coming so powerfully that they ripped open the doors of refrigerators and shattered windows.
One man explains why Iraqis who hated Hussein hate the invasion even more: “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place? I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money? I feel like it’s an insult, really. What they’re doing to us, they deserve to have done to them … their children.”
The complaints heard so often in the news – the lack of security, clean water, electricity – are repeated here over and again, but when attached to people, they mean something tangible. It seems obvious that, left unsolved long enough, such legitimate complaints would coalesce in the form of someone who rose from the street, such as Shiite Muslim leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whom Shadid first meets and interviews when he is thrown into the limelight, awkward and blinking, a figure of resistance.
Sadly, Shadid never believed the confrontation between Sadr’s army and U.S. forces in Sadr City in August 2004 was inevitable. It came as the result, he says, of misinterpretations and a lack of sympathy. And it was kicked off in part by the image of a U.S. helicopter trying to knock down a flag inscribed with the name of an important religious figure. Broadcast over television in Iraq, the picture infuriated Shiites already on edge.
Perhaps it looks different within the fog of war, but from hindsight it seems impossible not to interpret these events as precursors to a nationwide insurgency, led, Shadid makes clear, not from one source but from a variety of people united by a language of religion.
“Iraq had now joined Palestine and Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia, all countries where a besieged Muslim population was pitted against a more powerful foe” he writes. “When Night Falls” reveals that this war might have gone a different way – especially, it would seem, if we had listened to the people of Iraq as Shadid did from the beginning.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
Night Draws Near
By Anthony Shadid
Henry Holt, 426 pages, $26
