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Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, by Anthony Shadid
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From the only journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Iraq, here is a riveting account of ordinary people caught between the struggles
of nations
Like her country, Karima—a widow with eight children—was caught between America and Saddam. It was March 2003 in proud but battered Baghdad. As night drew near, she took her son to board a rickety bus to join Hussein’s army. “God protect you,” she said, handing him something she could not afford to give—the thirty-cent fare.
The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid also went to war in Iraq although he was neither embedded with soldiers nor briefed by politicians. Because he is fluent in Arabic, Shadid—an Arab American born and raised in Oklahoma—was able to disappear into the divided, dangerous worlds of Iraq. Day by day, as the American dream of freedom clashed with Arab notions of justice, he pieced together the human story of ordinary Iraqis weathering the terrible dislocations and tragedies of war.
Through the lives of men and women, Sunnis and Shiites, American sympathizers and outraged young jihadists newly transformed into martyrs, Shadid shows us the journey of defiant, hopeful, resilient Iraq. Moving from battle scenes to subdued streets enlivened only by the call to prayer, Shadid uses the experiences of his characters to illustrate how Saddam’s downfall paved the way not only for democracy but also for an Islamic reawakening and jihad.
Night Draws Near—as compelling as it is human—is an illuminating and poignant account from a repoter whose coverage has drawn international attention and acclaim.
- Sales Rank: #1260372 in Books
- Published on: 2005-09-07
- Released on: 2005-08-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.25" w x 6.48" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
- war
- terrorist
Amazon.com Review
Most of the accounts of the Iraq War so far have been, to use the term the war made famous, embedded in one way or another: many officially so with American troops, most others limited--by mobility, interest, or understanding--to the American experience of the conflict. In Night Draws Near, Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid writes about a side of the war that Americans have heard little about. His beat, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is the territory outside the barricaded, air-conditioned Green Zone: the Iraqi streets and, more often, the apartments and houses, darkened by blackouts and shaken by explosions, where most Iraqis wait out Saddam, the invasion, and three nearly unbroken decades of war.
Shadid is Lebanese American, born in Oklahoma, and he has a fluency in Arabic and an understanding of Arab culture that give him a rare access to and a great empathy for the people whose stories he tells. Beginning in the days leading up to the American invasion and closing with an epilogue on the January 2005 elections, he talks with Iraqis from a wide range of stations, from educated Baghdad professionals who look back on the country's golden days in the 1970s to a sullen, terrified group of Iraqi policemen in the Sunni Triangle, shunned as collaborators for taking jobs with the Americans to feed their families. (Perhaps his most telling and characteristic moment is when he trails behind an American patrol, recording the often hostile Iraqi comments that the soldiers themselves can't understand.) He takes the ground view and gives his witnesses the particularity they deserve, but the various voices share an exhaustion with a country that has seen nothing but war for 30 years and a frustration with a liberator that has not fulfilled its promises of prosperity and order. It's a despairing but eye-opening account, told with an understanding of the Iraqi people--hospitable, proud, and often desperate--that, were it more common, might have led to a different outcome than the one he describes. --Tom Nissley
Questions for Anthony Shadid
Anthony Shadid won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the lives of ordinary Iraqis during wartime. His new book, Night Draws Near, tells the story of the runup to the war, the invasion, and its uncertain aftermath through the Iraqi eyes. He took a few moments from a busy week reporting on the Sharm el-Sheik bombings to answer some questions about his book.
Amazon.com: Where are you now? What sort of mobility do you have when you are in Baghdad? Have you been able to get back in contact with the people you follow in the book?
Anthony Shadid: I'm in Cairo right now and heading for Beirut, where The Washington Post has its Middle East bureau. From there, I'll head back to Baghdad. Getting around that city has become the most difficult aspect of reporting there. In 2003, after the U.S. invasion, reporters had almost unlimited access. We traveled to the Syrian border, Falluja, Samarra, Mosul, all places that are extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to visit now. I do still visit the people that I wrote about in Night Draws Near. At this point, many of them have become friends. I'm reluctant to visit too often, for fear of bringing unwanted attention. But I manage to keep up with their lives and how they're doing, particularly Karima's family.
Amazon.com: You are a Lebanese American, born in Oklahoma, fluent in Arabic, and well-versed in Arab culture. What has that background allowed you to see and understand? To what extent do Iraqis whom you meet see you as American or as Arab?
Shadid: In Iraq, I think I was seen as a little of both. I was always a foreigner, but maybe a foreigner who shared a sense of history, a common background. When references to history were made, to culture and traditions, it was expected that I would understand what was being said. Sometimes it was subtle, but I think my background probably helped foster a degree of trust that's so important to reporting.
Amazon.com: What have Americans, both in Iraq and back home in the U.S., most misunderstood about Iraqis and the situation in their country?
Shadid: My sense is that the biggest misunderstanding was perhaps a lack of appreciation for what preceded the invasion. I think some in the United States saw Iraq as a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which a new country would be built, a democracy that would serve as an example to a region mired in stagnation and authoritarianism. But a lot of what we saw after Saddam's fall was the consequence of what Iraq had already gone though. Not only Saddam, either. There was the war with Iran, one of the longest of the 20th century. There was a decade of sanctions, whose impact I think has always been underappreciated. There was a militarization of the society that made the culture of the gun and the logic of violence dominant in many regions of Iraq. The country that the United States inherited was brutalized, and the aftermath of that decades-long experience will probably define it far more than Saddam's fall, the insurgency, and the hardship that has followed. I guess I'm struck over the past years at how much Iraqis simply yearn for an ordinary life. Little has been ordinary in that country for the past 30 years. I always had the sense in conversations, especially in Baghdad, that people felt they were spectators to a play. They watched as actors read their lines, as the drama unfolded. There's still a sense of being in the audience today.
Amazon.com: What do Iraqis most misunderstand about Americans?
Shadid: I think it's less misunderstanding and more perspective. The sense of distrust of the United States is often powerful, and it colors much of what the Americans do in Iraq. As in much of the Arab world, the United States has inherited a reputation from past decades. Support for Israel, for authoritarian Arab regimes, for Saddam himself during the war with Iran in the 1980s has made many in Iraq and elsewhere suspicious of U.S. intentions. The refrain you hear so often is that the Americans are in Iraq for their own interests, and those interests include domination of the region, Iraq's oil, furthering Israel's interests, and so on. At another level, there's the very question of the U.S. presence. To some, the United States was a liberator. To others, it was an occupier. But to nearly all, it was the strongest actor in the country. That strength automatically creates a relationship of more powerful to less powerful. With a history of colonialism and repression, there was an acute sensitivity to that. American slights were seen as disrespectful, misunderstandings were seen as arrogance, and often, they both were read as the indignity of living under a power that is both alien and foreign.
Amazon.com: Your book closes with an epilogue on the January 2005 elections. What did that moment represent from the Iraqi point of view? Have the hopes of that time persisted at all through the violence that has followed?
Shadid: What struck me most during the election was the sense people in Baghdad had of staking a claim to their own destiny. On that day, Iraqis--not their overlords, not foreigners--were the agents of change; they themselves were deciding their fate. Watching those streets that day, I realized that it was the first time since I had been in Iraq, through dictatorship, war, and occupation, that Iraqis themselves were claiming the right to make their voices heard. It spoke to the trait that I think perhaps best defines Iraq: a stubborn, sometimes breathtaking resilience that drives life forward. To be honest, I think the moment was somewhat short-lived. Since the fall of Saddam, Iraq has been locked in a cycle of moments of optimism, followed by long, depressing months of brutality and dejection. There have been turning points, and Iraqis have often greeted them with hope and optimism. Disillusionment has typically followed. Resilience persists, but not always hope, and it goes back to the idea I mentioned earlier: a sense of watching a play unfold, in which most Iraqis find themselves spectators to forces beyond their control.
From Publishers Weekly
Born in Oklahoma and fluent in Arabic, journalist Shadid (Legacy of the Prophet) has the gift of a caricature artist, capturing personality in a few deft lines. In this set of reportage-based profiles from Baghdad pre– and post–March 2003, we meet Amal, a 14-year-old girl who moves from faith to fear to gallows humor in her diary; a long-married couple who bicker affectionately (the husband says George Bush is his hero; the wife wants to talk only about the lack of electricity); a Muslim cleric in Sadr City who has "the kind of swagger that a pistol on each hip brings." The portraits are intimate, often set in people's homes, and are rendered with such kindness they fall just short of sentimentality. Yet Shadid does not shy from the ugliness of violence, rendering the swollen corpse of a child left in the sun and the disarray of a bombed house, its front gate "peeled back like a can." The book, which moves among scenes and characters like a picaresque novel, is not only a pleasure to read but a welcome source of information. Shadid offers just enough history and context to orient the reader, and he includes the kinds of details—adages, prayers, lyrics from pop songs—that make a place come alive. In the end, Baghdad is the character he mourns most.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
On April 9, 2003, Shadid, a Washington Post reporter, witnessed the toppling of Saddam 's statue in Firdaus Square; a year later, he watched as American troops encircled the square with razor wire, with orders to shoot anyone who crossed it. With that, he writes, the "first lasting image of the American entry … had emerged as a symbol again—this time, of a city returned to the precipice." Shadid won a Pulitzer for his work in Iraq, and his account of the invasion and its uncertain aftermath is both stark and profoundly humane. He visits a father who was forced to execute his son, whose only crime was coöperating with Americans; a cleric who wears a 9-mm. pistol on each hip; and a destitute fourteen-year-old girl who, in her diary, asks God to protect her from bombs. Shadid's concern isn't Pentagon policy but the interior life of the occupation, where the goals of the American mission remain, for the Iraqis he meets, tragically abstract.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Why They Fight
By jeffergray
Some cautionary notes about this book are appropriate. It was so well-reviewed when it came out back in the autumn that my expectations for it were raised higher than they perhaps should have been. It's important to understand that Shadid focuses on a chunk of barely eighteen months in America's relationship with Iraq, starting in the fall of 2002 and largely concluding in the spring of 2004, although there is a very short and uncertain epilogue about the Constituent Assembly elections of January 2005. And the first six months of that roughly eighteen-month period - the period leading up to the war itself - are covered pretty spottily. My impression was that Shadid made only a couple of short trips to Baghdad in the latter part of 2002, and just didn't have much first-hand material to work from.
Likewise, there were other points in the earlier parts of the book when Shadid would be describing his interactions with an Iraqi family, and I found myself thinking that no terribly worthwhile insights were emerging from this encounter. I got the sense that Shadid had these old newspaper reports, and his publisher wanted them used to flesh things out, even if they didn't tell you that much in retrospect.
But hang in there, because at about page 156, the book really catches fire. In contrast to the somewhat stretched, spotty feeling of much of what precedes it, his almost 40-page chapter on Muqtada Sadr and his movement is a compelling, incisive, and revealing extended essay. And then Shadid gets to the Occupation, and here he really finds his voice. From his description of the senseless death of an average and perfectly harmless fifteen-year-old in an upper Tigris valley village on page 219 until the end of the book, the tragic power of the story Shadid has to tell wraps you in its grip and doesn't let go.
Among the points he drives home are the following. The failure to provide security in Baghdad upon the collapse of the old regime, and the feckless inability to restore essential services like electricity in the months that followed, almost immediately squandered whatever goodwill might otherwise have accrued to the Americans for getting rid of Saddam. By as early as the summer months of 2003, the Americans had already worn out their welcome and the essential conditions necessary for the growth and resilience of the insurgency had been established.
Shadid also effectively brings out the immense cultural chasm that separated Iraqis from Americans. He recounts how, when an American patrol stops in at a school to see if the teachers need anything and to fraternize with the children, Iraqi men in the neighborhood suspiciously assume the soldiers are inside having sex with the female teachers.
But Shadid's most remarkable accomplishment is to help the reader understand how and why young Iraqi men were willing to take up arms and join the insurgency, even though they knew that - especially in the early days - trying to carry the fight to the American military was quite literally a suicide mission. Don Rumsfeld to the contrary, Shadid suggests that for most of the insurgents it had nothing to do with being Baathist bitter-enders. Instead, a potent cocktail of national pride, religious feeling, and resentment of actual or inadvertent humiliations by the occupying forces fuels the insurgency.
This is a terribly sad book. Unlike George Packer or Seymour Hersh, Shadid does not focus at all on the senior councils of American government. But by showing the impact on a disparate collection of Iraqis of what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith et al. planned, did, and failed to do, Shadid paints a devastating portrait of the consequences of policymaking characterized by a terrifying lack of understanding.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Beyond the Headlines
By Byron
Everything you wanted to know about Iraq that you won't find in any of the major media is here. Shadid does a better job of putting the war in in perspective than anything I have read anywhere. He offers terrific insights into Iraqi history, customs, people and perceptions of "America's war"--before, during and since. Every journalist covering this war and ever decision-maker in the executive and legislative branches of government should be required to read this book.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Welcome Dose of Reality
By James T. Currie
Anthony Shadid has done us a great service by writing this book. As an Arabic-speaker of Lebanese descent, he has been able to get out and mingle with ordinary Iraqis and brings a perspective that is sorely lacking in other accounts of the war and its aftermath. His stories of how we managed to go into Iraq without understanding much about the people and culture we were confronting there make one wish that a few of our national leaders had taken the time to do some studying of that part of the world prior to committing us to war. It also makes one wonder about the analysts at CIA, DIA, and State. Were they also so lacking in knowledge and understanding, were they ignored, or was there something else? Shadid's ability to make the reader understand just why so many Iraqis dislike us to the point of wanting to kill us is a useful counterpoint to the belief that all we have to do is stop the foreign terrorists from entering the country, and all will be well. Shadid's accounts of men who hate our soldiers so much that they are willing to martyr themselves in trying to kill a few GIs and Marines is eye-opening. This book is one that ought to be read by anyone who is concerned about what we are doing in Iraq today. Unfortunately, I suspect that it will be ignored by those who need it most--our national leaders in both the executive and the legislative branch.
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