NIGHT DRAWS NEAR

Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War

By Anthony Shadid

Henry Holt. 424 pp. $26

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.