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Wamidh would saythings that I wouldalways feel guiltyputting in storiesbecause I felt it

would get him introuble. Remember

that these wereSaddam days

September 15, 2005

Iraq’s Peoplein the Shadow ofAmerica’s War

Anthony Shadid,Washington PostCorrespondent;Author: Night Draws Near

What I want to speak to you about today is Iraq. I will try to draw a little biton the experiences that I’ve had in Iraq and experiences that I’ve put inthe book as well, about the situation and the way I see ordinary life in a

country that I think has been at the forefront of our attention for a little more thanthree years now.

I first arrived there in 1998 as a re-porter for the Associated Press and I wentthere again in 2002 with the Boston Globe,and then I returned in March 2003, a littlebit before the invasion began. I wasblessed, I think, in my time there and thenespecially in the aftermath, in 2004 and2005, to work with some of the most re-markable journalists I think I’ve ever dealtwith. Editors who were able to see thestories and understand them and fellowreporters, colleagues who worked withme in Baghdad were among, as I said,the best people I’ve ever met.

When I sat down to write NightDraws Near, I partly felt like I was just stringing together words. My editor wasGeorge Hodgman and he contacted me in May 2003 about writing a book that wouldchronicle the U.S. invasion that I had been in Iraq to cover and also the people I’dmet at that time. To be honest with you, when George contacted me I was, at first,reluctant. I had just joined the Post a few months before and at a time that seemedso crucial to both Iraq and the United States I was reluctant to leave Baghdad. Ithink it is important I wasn’t sure what I could say about the invasion itself.

As I mulled George’s proposal over in those weeks that I was staying at theHamid Hotel in Baghdad, I soon realized that there might be a broader story to write,an account that was probably impossible in the face of daily journalism limitations–800 words, quick writing, quick deadlines. I thought that if at all possible, I wantedto write two stories, to treat two stories in much greater depth. The first one, whichbecame the dominant narrative in Night Draws Near, was the way ordinary peopleare forced to endure times that are anything but ordinary. In the other story, whatbecame the dominant theme were the consequences that resulted when two culturesthat are so estranged are forced to occupy the same space. Today I’m going to tryto describe as best as I can stories that I think are often cast in terms of black andwhite, and hopefully introduce an element of gray into that.

I think Iraq is a remarkably complicated country. I remember saying, after I won

the Pulitzer Prize last year, that I felt like Iunderstood the country a lot less thelonger I was there. In a way, writing thebook over the past couple of years is away to come to terms with that and try tounderstand why that was the case. Ithink that process started with a man thatI met back in 1998 named WamidhNadhme. Wamidh is a professor of po-litical science at Baghdad University andhe became a very good friend of mine intime. I remember describing him as a burlyacademic, 62 years of age, with short-cropped gray hair and a cough from alifelong cigarette habit. He was a remark-able guy I first met him I was told by acolleague that Wamidh was basically theonly person that I should talk to in Iraq,the reason being that he was the onlyone that would speak honestly. He didspeak very honestly and very forth-rightly. Wamidh would say things that Iwould always feel guilty putting in sto-ries because I felt it would get him introuble. You must remember that thesewere Saddam days when it was one ofthe world’s worst dictatorships, I think,of the past century. There was a reasonWamidh was talking honestly. It’s kindof an interesting story, which I’ll sharewith you briefly.

Wamidh was a young member of theBaath party in the 1950s and early ’60s,before he left that party and he was anexile in Cairo, Egypt. In 1959 he got a callfrom party operatives in Baghdad whotold him he should be ready to welcomeseven men who would be coming fromBaghdad—some fellow Baathists—and being a goodparty member he said, “Sure, I’ll do that.”He went to the Cairo airport, and one of

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Wamidh in 2003, I think just a few weeksbefore the invasion itself began. Like somany Baghdadis Wamidh was trying invain to make sense of the cacophony thatsurrounded him in those months beforethe U.S. attack.

“I won’t hide my feelings. The Americaninvasion had nothing to dowith democracy and humanrights. It is basically an angryresponse to the events of Sep-tember 11, an angry responseto the survival of SaddamHussein, and it has somethingto do with oil interests in thearea.” He talked about the 1990invasion of Kuwait and sug-gested that the U.S.-led attackin that instance might havebeen justified. But what aboutmore than a decade of sanc-tions? And now another war?“It will be more destruction,” hetold me, “more civil war, and anationalist war against Ameri-can intervention in the internalaffairs of Iraqis.”

“Even if the Ameri-cans are capable of overthrow-ing the regime, they will facemore and more resistance fromfactions and groups who are

not necessarily pro-regime. This is notpolitics,” Wamidh told me. He shook hishead, “This is a circus.”

I think back to the past couple ofyears of being a reporter in Iraq and Ithink of some of the terms that I’ve heardto explain what Iraq is and what thecountry’s like. One description is the onewe just heard: “it’s a circus.” Otherpeople had different descriptions. I re-member one person termed it “a city oflanterns” amid all the blackouts that stillreigned in Baghdad. Another person toldme it was a “city of ghosts shadowed byfear.” One widow that I met during thewar and stayed in touch with and becamefriends with in the months and years that

followed, described it as a city that’s for-saken. Her daughter was a young girlwho turned 14 during the invasion. I mether at that time, too. She kept a diaryduring the war and during the aftermath.It was a diary that I feel was very elo-quent and often very touching in how itoffered an unvarnished and very rarelook at Iraq. She often referred to Iraqisas eating “dry bread with tea,” and thosewords always stuck with me. They stuckwith me because I thought of Iraq in away as a land of dry bread with tea.Wamidh said, he was predicting what wasahead—this is before the invasion hadeven gotten started—he was predictingan insurgency, he was predicting gue-rilla war, he was predicting chaos. Hiswords were a hint of the war that wasahead. Here’s a voice that slashed coloracross what to a lot of us is a monochro-matic landscape, and it was a voice ofcomplexity, a complexity I think that jour-nalists like me would soon encounter inthe weeks and months that followed theinvasion itself.

I think when we look back on Iraqthere’s no question that the repression,to a remarkable degree, defined every-thing that was going on in the country. Idon’t want to understate the depth oftyranny that reigned in Iraq before theinvasion. It was without question one ofthe century’s worst dictatorships. It wasoverwhelming and it was suffocating.But looking back I think absolute empha-sis on these repressions, on this all-en-compassing tyranny, blinded us perhapsto everything else that was there. Timeand again I think we envisioned a simpletwo-dimensional portrait of the country.We saw this great need for aid and dream-ing of freedom as they suffered underthis terror. Iraq in those days, we weretold, was trapped in submission and vic-timization. Its people were voiceless, andwhen the dictator was removed by forceif need be, Iraq would be a free state onwhich we could build a new country thatmight serve as a beacon to the rest of theregion. I think I spent my entire time in

Anthony Shadid,Washington Post Correspondent;

Author: Night Draws Near

the seven men turned out to be SaddamHussein. When he brought Saddam backto his apartment, he put him up for acouple of nights. A year and one-halflater a fellow Iraqi said that he heardSaddam was having his tonsils out at thehospital in Cairo and he thought, “Well,as a fellow Iraqi I should probably go

visit him and pay my respects.” It turnedout that Wamidh was the only person togo visit Saddam and I think it had a last-ing impact, and probably explains a littlebit of why Wamidh was able to talk to methe way he did in 1998. I will share a briefpassage with you that talks about thisexperience:

“It was really accidental,” Wamidhsaid. “I usually don’t like waking up earlyin the morning but I thought, you know,he’s by himself, so I went to the hospital.Perhaps this is one of the reasons whySaddam did not cut off my head. I think,somehow, he had good memories of me.”

This is a conversation that I had with

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The United States nowcontrolled Iraq’sdestiny; we wouldnow decide its fate.And we understoodremarkably little aboutit. Deep down Iworried that we wouldnever try to know iteither

Iraq, starting with those conversationswith Wamidh, in the process of under-standing how wrong that was.

The United States fashioned itselfas a liberator, soon became an occupierand, I think, most important, it served asa catalyst for consequences that noneof us foresaw. And I first felt that in an

overpowering fashion at the end of theinvasion. It was April 9, 2003, and someof you might remember that date, it wasthe day that Saddam fell. It was the daythat a lot of people watched on TV whenthe statue came down. It was an incred-ibly dramatic moment, and I think it be-came almost one of those moments that,as you watch it, you realized it was goingto be iconic, you realized this is going tobe the lasting impression of what thisevent was. And I remember being con-fused a bit, and I would like to share apassage that describes what I sensed asI was standing on that street on that af-ternoon.

“The moment had little to do withme, yet I was overwhelmed by it. For afew minutes I could barely move,stopped by a flood of emotions inspiredby my role as a journalist and my identi-ties as an American and as an Arab-American. I gazed at the tanks, their en-gines whirring; I glanced around me, at a

crowd seized by jubilation, confusion andunease. I stared at the U.S. flag atop aBradley Fighting Vehicle, flutteringproudly, and I looked at the myriad emo-tions on the faces of those around me—Iraqi and American—intersecting thestreet in this most fabled Arab capital. Itwas the convergence of cultures acrossan immense chasm, brought together inBaghdad, their fates inextricably linkedas long as their presence was intertwined.As a journalist, I understood I would seesuch a moment only once in my lifetime.Even then, I had a feeling that I would becovering the repercussions of this eventfor the rest of my career. At that instant,I was overcome by the story, by its mag-nitude alone. I asked myself how I couldever hope to capture such an event witha few hours of reporting and a few morehours of writing. My emotions as anArab-American were more complicated,but abstract. Here was Baghdad, an an-cient city whose name evoked a proud,enduring memory, fallen to a foreignarmy. I felt neither anger nor joy; in away, I felt grief. Not at Saddam’s demise,but rather at the fate of a city, a destinythat brought about its conquest in thename of its liberation.

“I was in awe of the power of mycountry, America. What other nation,driven by ideology, its existence notthreatened, could conquer an entire coun-try in a matter of weeks? As a reporterabroad and as an expatriate, I often feltdivorced from U.S. politics, removed fromits debates. I could no longer enjoy thatanonymity. My country had taken overanother country, and I was watching ithappen. The United States now con-trolled Iraq’s destiny; we would now de-cide its fate. And we understood remark-ably little about it. Deep down I worriedthat we would never try to know it either.At best, we would try to force it into ourconstruct and preconception of what acountry should be. At worst, we wouldnot care, giving in to overly emotionalimpressions distorted by differences inlanguage, culture and traditions, and by

conceit. In between, the ambiguity thatso defined Iraq for me—the uncertainty,the ambivalence, and the legacy of itshistory—would become too complicatedto unravel.”

Standing on this vantage point, talk-ing to you all today, I think my sense isthat the U.S. experience in Iraq, the storythat I’ve covered for the past couple ofyears, is a microcosm of America’sbroader struggle with the Arab world. It’sa battle that, I think, is generational, andit’s about a battle that spins around theaxes of religion, culture and identity. Andas I said in the beginning of the talk, Ithink it’s a battle that is being waged bytwo cultures that are in a way so es-tranged that they can’t occupy the samespace. I actually believe that, but I alsobelieve something else. I don’t know ifthe Americans in Iraq were ever actuallyable to acknowledge that point. It soundssimple, but as Americans they thoughtlike Americans. More often than not, Ira-qis didn’t.

In reporting for the Post in Iraq andin gathering the material that went intothe book, I tried to force myself in astrange way to no longer be an Americanbut instead to be a journalist in the truemeaning of the word. I had to listen andnot to judge, I had to hear and not tolecture, and through that I think I saw awindow on a country that was being re-shaped as each day passed. As a jour-nalist I saw moments I might not haveseen otherwise. I think back to coveringa militia that was loyal to a young Shiitecleric. His militia, called the Mahdi Army,fought the Americans twice in 2004. TheAmericans saw the battlefield in thosedays, as something very logical, veryunderstandable. They looked at it in tac-tical terms and they understood whatwould constitute a victory. They weren’tthe rules of the Mahdi Army of the Shiitemilitia that I was covering. The MahdiArmy constantly rewrote the notion ofwinning and losing; they never thoughtthey would win; winning really didn’t

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The Mahdi Armyconstantly rewrote thenotion of winning and

losing; they neverthought they wouldwin; winning really

didn’t matter to them;fighting itself was avictory, and in that

calculus, in thatarithmetic, there was

no such thing asdefeat

story happened in a place calledThuluyah, which is a small village alongthe Tigris River near Baghdad in a re-gion that is dominated by Sunni ArabMuslims. I want to share a little back-ground with you. This man’s name wasSabah. He was a young guy in his early20s and he had helped the Americans pin-point suspected insurgents. He had fol-lowed the American troops into the vil-lage and pointed out suspects. Dozenswere arrested and in the process of theraid a few people were killed. The villag-ers were outraged and they blamedSabah, the young man, for those deaths.They went to his father and they said,“Either you kill your son or we’re goingto kill the rest of your family.”

A few weeks later the father made adecision. He led his son, together withanother son, behind the house, pastgroves of oranges and tangerines, pastorchards of figs, almonds and vineyards.His father raised his rifle and fired twoshots. The accounts when I talked withthe family differ at that point. Somepeople say he collapsed after firing thesetwo shots, and that his other son thenraised his rifle and fired three more shots,one of them striking Sabah in the headand killing him.

I want to share with you what hap-pened when I met the father a few weekslater, when I was working on this story:

“In a simple hut of cement and cin-der blocks I sat with Sabah’s father as henervously thumbed black prayer beads,his pace quickening as the minutespassed. We sipped tea. Two overheadfans lazily churned the oven-like air. Eachword of conversation was labored. Si-lently I replayed the question I had for-mulated: Had he killed his son? I alreadyknew the answer. But when the opportu-nity arrived, I couldn’t ask. Even as ajournalist, in a job that celebrates provo-cation and whose standards require con-firmation, I couldn’t muster the courageto broach the question. In a moment so

tragic, so wretched, there still had to bedecency. I didn’t want to hear him sayyes. I didn’t want to humiliate him anyfurther. In the end, I didn’t have to. Thefather’s words, deepened by age andgrief, were soft, almost a whisper. Hedragged on a locally-made cigarette, ashe sat cross-legged on the floor. His eyesglimmered with faint traces of tears, shim-mering. ‘I have the heart of a father, andhe’s my son,’ he told me, his eyes cast tothe ground. ‘Even the prophet Abrahamdidn’t have to kill his son.’ He stopped,steadying his voice. ‘There was no otherchoice.’”

I think those words that his fathersaid to me that day are words that I willprobably never forget—that even the

Prophet Abraham didn’t have to kill hisson. I think in reporting in Iraq I’ve comeacross these choices that are choices thatI would never want to make and choicesthat I don’t think should have to be made.Iraq is, in many ways, as I said earlier, inthe words of the widow that I met, for-saken, abandoned, and I think it’s littleunderstood. All too often perspectivesare forced into predetermined narratives,and when most voices don’t fit, I think

matter to them; fighting itself was a vic-tory, and in that calculus, in that arith-metic, there was no such thing as defeat.

I remember back to the summer of2003 when I was in Western Iraq. I wasin a town called Albu Alwan which is nearFallujah, which I think a lot of people herewill recognize as being the city that be-came kind of a symbol of the insurgencyin a way, and which was later pretty muchdestroyed in an offense last year. Therewas a man I was interested in reportingon, but by the time I reached the villagehe had died. So I talked to his family andI tried to understand why he would killhimself in an attack on an American con-voy. I heard a lot of different explana-tions for that. Some people said it wasall about money; some people said theBaathists had offered him hundreds andhundreds of dollars to carry out this at-tack if he would do it. Other people saidit was religion; they said he was inspiredby faith, that he saw it as his religiousduty to fight the occupation; some peoplesaid it was nationalism, that day after dayhe’d seen the American convoys travel-ing along the road that overlooked hishouse and that had finally driven him toact.

In the end I didn’t know and as I satdown to write this story I had no ideawhat the true explanation was. It mighthave been a little of each; it may havebeen none of the above. But what struckme in reporting that story was that itdidn’t matter in the end, it didn’t matterwhat the village thought was his motiva-tion. Almost without exception, in a smallvillage near Fallujah everyone consideredhim a martyr, and as a martyr he was con-sidered a hero.

Another story I’m going to sharewith you is the story about a father thatI met who had to kill his son. It was atribal justice, a choice that I don’t thinkany of us will ever face, obviously, butmore important it’s a choice that I don’tthink anybody can really imagine. This

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they’re ignored.

Working for the past few years inIraq I’ve come to cringe at a certain levelat words like “liberation” and “democ-racy.” I understand how words like“transparency” have become the butt ofjokes. What do those terms mean in Iraq?In some ways, I’m not sure who that nar-rative is supposed to be directed at andI’m not sure who that narrative is sup-posed to serve.

I want to close with a passage froma diary of the young girl that I mentionedearlier in my talk. Her name is Amal, sheturned fourteen, as I said, during the U.S.invasion. The passage of her diary isnot in the book. It’s something that Ijust came across a few weeks ago when Iwas spending time with her family. Itdoesn’t offer any conclusions nor doesit offer any answers to the questionsraised today. I don’t think it really tellsus something that we don’t know. WhatI think is striking is that it was an unvar-nished window on this country that Icovered for two years and still don’t un-derstand. It asks questions, it offers in-sights, it’s filled with contradictions, andI think, like her country itself, it is hauntedby loss. I think in a country where theword “liberation” can sometimes beabused, here was an instance where Ithought it really mattered.

Amal’s voice was a voice of an Iraqthat few of us saw, that few of us heard.It was an Iraq that was forever changedin ways good and I think bad. It was avoice that I tried very modestly to con-vey in the book Night Draws Near. I wantto read these words. I’m always struckby this passage because I think—I prob-ably should let the words speak for them-

selves—but I was struck by this passageby how much it says that’s gray, that notone person is at fault, not one person isa hero, that sentiments contradict, thatthey conflict, but together they make upa portrait of what the countryis today. In her words:

“This morning did notbegin with the cries of therooster as usual but with thesounds of bombs and explo-sions in our neighborhood.At around seven in the morn-ing a huge explosion shookthe area, targeting themosque, which is oppositethe apartment building inwhich I live. For a moment Ithought I had died, and then Irealized I was not dead, that Iwas still scared. In a momentthe police car was burned andthose inside were dead,burned. A young man whoonly recently announced hisengagement died along witha good old man who lives inthe neighborhood, and aKurd who owns a shop in asmall shopping center here.This is the first time in my lifethat I have seen with my own eyes a realscene like this—not through the news.It’s a true disaster, which I will never for-get as long as I live. Glass was shatteredand scattered all over the bodies. Thenthe of relatives who came looking forthem, families, brothers, mothers and soon, all came searching and crying outloud, “My son, my brother, father, whereare you?” and they would start askinganyone, like someone who had lost some-thing that left no trace. Finally, after abouteight hours an American military truck

loaded with water bottles came over andan American woman soldier was distrib-uting the water bottles at the same placewhere the explosion took place. Peoplethen lined up in a long line in front of the

American truck and received the water.It was a scene that was hard to describe,as if Iraqis were beggars standing in linein a humiliating way. During the dispens-ing of water bottles the American womansoldier gave a camera to the translator totake a few pictures. Afterwards the peoplemarched in a funeral procession womenwere crying and full of grief on their faces,seemed bewildered and not able to un-derstand why so many people have todie.”

Thank you.

Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War: Anthony Shadid

Speeches to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council are edited for readability, not content.The Council is a non-partisan organization. The views expressed herein are solely those of the individual authors.

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