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 ongoing 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 you 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 backseat 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 Night Draws Near to hit stores.
This is a shame, because Anthony Shadid’s book about the effect of this war on Iraqi people is beautifully reported, a crucial piece of context in a war in which, as it turns out, context is everything. “Time and again, I am struck by how seldom I hear the word hurriya, ‘freedom,’ in conversations about politics in the Arab World,” Shadid writes 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 feel 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 been suffering through wars for over 30 years. The most costly of these conflicts was the Iran-Iraq war, started by Saddam, but funded by the U.S. 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 they’d step on land mines, in hopes the explosion would take just a part of their body. “You would hear the scream,” he 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 men 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 they blew open the doors of refrigerators and shattered windows. One man explains why even Iraqis who hated Saddam 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 Moqtada Sadr, whom Shadid first meets and interviews when he is thrown into the limelight, awkward and blinking, a figure of resistance.
Sadly, Shadid never felt that the confrontation between Sadr’s army and U.S. forces in Sadr City last August 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, the picture infuriated Sunnis 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. Night Draws Near 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.
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