Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near
I have just finished reading Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near. If you want an understanding of America in Iraq, you must read it. Shadid is an Arab-American, and a Pulitzer winning reporter for the Washington Post. He was assigned to Iraq prior to the war and is fluent in Arabic. The book was published in 2005. It describes the situation in Iraq as it evolved through the war, the toppling of the statue, and the reaction of Iraqis as 2003 moved into 2004 and then early 2005. It can break your heart.
Early on I proposed why any American welcome in Iraq was unlikely to remain positive for very long:
1. We were going in essentially alone, with only the Brits as a substantive ally. The Brits were the last western power to try to suborn Iraq, and the Iraqi’s remember.
2. We were an alien - i.e. non-Muslim- culture.
3. We were Israel’s great champion in the world. No apologies, but it would not endear us to any Arab/Muslim population.
4. The Iraq’s knew we were interested in their oil.
What one discovers in Night Draws Near is how perilously short a ‘grace period’ we had.
Shadid outlines a range of Iraqi mind sets after the statue came down. The Shia welcomed us, but were soon caught up in an intense religious revival as they emerged from the long repression of Saddam’s Iraq. To the extent this would assume a fundamentalist Islamic cast, it would undermine American hopes. The Sunnis were broadly glad to be free of Saddam, but were anxious to maintain their traditional primacy in Iraq. As such they would become a large and ready base for an insurgency.
On top of this basic divergence is what might be most easily grasped by contemporary Americans as a red state/blue state divide. City Iraqis - principally Baghdadis - held more cosmopolitan views, and were likely to remain open and tolerant far more than ‘country’ Iraqis, who were fiercely traditional as to Islam and, equally important, as to Arab/tribal customs and mores. In particular the Sunni Arabs of Anbar very, very quickly became deeply dedicated and savagely engaged against ‘the occupation’.
Then Shadid discovers another destabilizing division within Shia Iraq.
For an analogy we might go back to the Roman republic. The republic was ruled by an aristocratic oligarchy. From time to time, one of their number would stir up unrest by making an explicit appeal to the poor and dispossessed - to plebian Rome [see the Gracchi and, later, Caesar].
In Iraq, unlike the Sunnis, the Shia have a well established, scholarly, and revered clerical elite (no little of it Iranian oriented). In the early 1990’s, one member of this elite, Mohammad Mohammad Sadiq al Sadr (Muqtada Sadr’s father), assumed the ‘populist’ role. He gained a pronounced following, antagonizing his clerical colleagues, and drawing Saddam’s attention - and assassins. Those assassins did away with him in the late 90’s. With the fall of Saddam, the father’s following quickly re-emerged and marshaled behind the son. As such they constituted a body of angry and embittered Iraqis, of fundamentalist sentiment, who are less amenable, even antagonistic, to the sway of the traditional clergy.
By the fall of 2003, we had lost the vast majority of ‘country’ Sunnis, and the Muqtadaist element of Shia was not on our side. In fact the vast majority of all Iraqis, of whatever allegiance, were deeply resentful of the alien, non-Muslim, American presence.
What Shadid so movingly presents is the travail of everyday Iraqis as the situation unraveled, and so many of them passed from hope to despair, and towards identification with the insurgency.
What becomes clear is that one year after the statue toppled, the principle impetus for violence was not competition for power in the new Iraq, nor was it any atavistic Al Qaeda derived fury against modernity (and its western avatars), but a hatred for the occupation. Occupation itself was a perceived insult. Then a deep fury was engendered as America failed to deliver on its promises for a better life in Iraq, and Iraqis came to see, and keenly experience, American disrespect for Islam, and for Arab customs, manners and mores:
"It cannot be endured!"
By the spring of 2004, with Fallujah, the Ashura bombings in Karbala, and Abu Ghraib, the window had closed, and the game was over with respect to the situation America had contrived for Iraq.
Any hope after that - until to this moment - would have to depend on a radical restructuring of the effort. And that hope would be very, very slim.
No such restructuring has been seen. [There isn’t even a hint of it in the current plan for the surge.]
The book closes with Shadid witnessing the election in January of 2005. One gathers he was somewhat surprised by the genuine euphoria of the moment. In the end he concludes, quite reasonably I think, that all Iraqis saw the election as their first chance in 35 years to have a say in shaping their own futures. Tragically, the context in which those elections unfolded was fatally flawed. The choices offered were essentially: Vote for me, I’m Shia. Vote for me, I’m Sunni. Vote for me, I’m Kurd. In the event, the Sunnis largely declined to participate, while the Shia and the Kurds participated with enthusiasm. The Shia saw their first chance in all Islamic history to become the dominant power in an Arab/Muslim land, and the Kurds were determined to perpetuate the autonomy they had exercised for a decade in the north. The result was a set of elected representatives who understood their role as championing the narrow sectarian interests of their respective factions. It was both the opening move and the shaping event for a descent towards civil war. The day of elections became a heart piercingly brief, bright gleam as night drew ever nearer.
Thus America in Iraq.
Cry the Beloved Country.
Both Countries!
7:01:27 PM 
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