Amid war, digging deeply

ANTHONY SHADID is a formidable journalist. His dispatches from Iraq for the Washington Post, for which he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, are remarkable for their insight and graceful writing.

Shadid has everything required for that assignment: a deep knowledge of Arab society, fluency in the language, personal courage and an empathy that allows him to engage with both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers and to reveal how an often feckless foreign policy plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It is no exaggeration to say that Shadid raised the bar for contemporary deadline war reporting in the Iraq conflict just as Ernie Pyle did as a correspondent in World War II.

His new book, “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” brings these dispatches, with all of their admirable qualities, back again in a more fluid and lasting form, and for those who did not have the opportunity to read them in their earlier incarnation it will have particular value.

But I think Shadid has written his book too soon. After a stint at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he has been back on the ground in Iraq. As I was reading “Night Draws Near,” I also read his daily dispatches in the Post: remarkable reports, about the U.S. military’s stumbling attempts to train a unit of terrified Iraqis and about alleged U.S. complicity in Kurdish abductions of political enemies.

Shadid barely has had time to reflect upon and synthesize his previous experiences or to revisit and investigate more deeply those events he witnessed during the onrush and aftermath of the fighting in 2003. Books by journalists prove of most lasting value if they do one or the other. A journalist might choose to write one because he or she feels driven to explore in depth the chance anecdotes of reporting, to flesh out tales that of necessity remained half-told in the press of daily news events.

David K. Shipler’s “Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land” is an admirable example of that kind of book. The other impulse may be the desire to vent the opinions that must be carefully suppressed in unbiased news coverage, to reflect on what has been learned and share the insights gained at the end of a lengthy or intense assignment. Thomas L. Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” remains a quintessential example of the worth of that kind of undertaking.

Because he is still on assignment in Iraq, Shadid is not yet free to fully unburden himself, and though “Night Draws Near” is not without some moments of personal introspection, I wish there had been more of them. An Arab American of Lebanese descent, born and raised in Oklahoma, he is unusually positioned to understand the ideas and emotions that drive all sides.

One of the strongest passages in the book’s early part, which deals with the buildup to war and the initial days of the conflict, is Shadid’s account of watching the might of a U.S. armored column as it advanced, victorious, down one of Baghdad’s main thoroughfares. He confesses that for a time he could barely move, so overcome was he by the conflicting emotions he felt as a reporter, as an American, as a man of Arab heritage. “Here was Baghdad, an ancient city whose name evoked a proud, enduring memory, fallen to a foreign army. I felt neither anger nor joy; in a way, I felt grief. Not at Saddam’s demise, but rather at the fate of a city, a destiny that brought about its conquest in the name of its liberation.”

Shadid has divided his book into five sections. He deals briefly with the prewar sense of dread in the first. In the second, he painfully conveys the terror, from the Baghdadis’-eye view, of the U.S. military action. The third deals with the looting rampage and the Iraqi sense of self-disgust it engendered. The fourth chronicles the swift embitterment of a population under an occupation force that bungled the restoration of basic services and sometimes abused innocent civilians. The final section, and to me by far the best, deals with the insurgency. It is here, in this most delicate and difficult area for a Westerner to penetrate, that Shadid’s special gifts become apparent.

His first book, “Legacy of the Prophet,” published in 2002, looked at the resurgence of Islamic movements in a number of contexts -- in Egypt and Sudan, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan. So he was well equipped to describe the faith’s fungibility as it was used to fill various political voids for those who perceived themselves as oppressed. “Like many religious movements in Muslim countries, political Islam was elastic in Iraq,” he writes. Those who wanted to find within it a glorious justification for violent resistance were easily able to do so.

To illustrate this in “Night Draws Near,” Shadid visits places in the aftermath of the kind of insurgent attacks that usually go unnoticed -- the ones in which no American is killed because the attackers are massively outgunned and under-prepared and have chosen hard targets, such as armored military vehicles, rather than soft ones, such as the (still) shamefully ill-equipped Iraqi security forces. It is these kinds of attacks -- hopeless, doomed, suicidal -- that show the insurgency’s real strength. When young men are willing to throw their lives away for nothing more than a gesture, rational calculations regarding countermeasures become impossible.

Painfully, painstakingly, Shadid reconstructs the stories of these “martyrs” by sitting with their families and their fellow villagers, all of whom exalt them. The effect is both chilling and profoundly sad.

In the author’s note that stands as a preface, Shadid modestly calls “Night Draws Near” a “first glance” at the sweeping events he witnessed. As such, it is a worthy effort. But I hope he will someday take the time to allow his penetrating gaze to linger longer on those events, for such a book would surely be a classic. *