On Iraq: a report and a rant

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Adam Daifallah

Montreal Gazette

THE FALL OF BAGHDAD

By Jon Lee Anderson

Penguin Press 389 pages, $36

A WAR AGAINST THE TRUTH: AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT OF THE INVASION OF IRAQ

By Paul William Roberts

Raincoast Books 366 pages, $39.95

In the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Western journalists were urged by U.S. military authorities to leave the country. Out of concern for their own safety, most heeded the call. But a select few did not - some out of sheer determination to witness the bombing up close, others to defy Washington's orders. For others still, by the time they were ready to go, it was simply too late to leave.

Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker magazine's man in Baghdad, falls into that last category. Despite orders from his editors to leave the country before the air raids began, Anderson remained, deeming it impossible to exit safely. It must have been an awful time for Anderson's family, but luckily for us, one of the Western world's most respected and gifted reporters had a front-row seat for the three-week conflict.

In The Fall of Baghdad, Anderson chronicles his travels and experiences in Iraq, which began years ago but intensified as of November 2002, in the leadup to the war. Like any good reporter, Anderson must have kept good notes, because this book reads just like a personal memoir. The impression the reader is left with is of a man committed to understanding his subject. Anderson works to try to understand why Saddam's regime was able stay in power so long and why he commanded the loyalty of his people. He writes of his time spent in Iran to try to better comprehend Iraq's long-repressed Shiite Muslim population.

One intimate story after the next is recounted, each offering a new portrait of an interesting person, event or place in Iraq. Among the most interesting are Anderson's interactions with his own driver, Sabah al-Taiee, a quite ordinary, but proud Iraqi man, and Ala Bashir, a one-time doctor to Saddam Hussein with whom Anderson strikes up a particularly special friendship.

From staving off the Saddam regime's appointed journalist "minders," to hiding contraband satellite telephones, to almost not being able to find a safe hotel room on the eve of the war, Anderson's book is at once lucid and exhilarating. It is edifying for any reader who wants an unvarnished look at what really transpired on the ground during the Iraq war and the buildup to it.

There are no strong opinions expressed in this book. Indeed, that is its greatest strength. It is pure reporting. Anderson paints the picture, and the reader is left to be the judge.

While Anderson's book is objective reportage at its finest, Paul William Roberts takes a distinctly different tact in A War Against the Truth. His retelling of the Iraq war is done through the lens of an angry citizen, furious at the United States for launching what he considers an immoral and illegal invasion.

Roberts alerts readers that he "cannot be objective" about his subject matter and that his writing was done "in a state of raging anger, and shame, about what I saw and about what I am still seeing."

It shows. While some of Roberts's stories about his experience in Iraq during the war are interesting, the majority are not. This book is essentially an anti-U.S. rant, laced with excessive hyperbole and vitriol.

Roberts, who penned articles for Harper's magazine and the Globe and Mail from inside Iraq during the war, accuses the United States of being an oligarchy run by men who pursue a "quintessentially imperialist and exploitative" foreign policy. For these men, Iraq "is a key part of a plan for world domination whose origins go back a decade to when Bush I was president." The "puerile and imperialist fantasies" of the Bush foreign policy architects will "see this entire gang of criminals thoroughly discredited, if not jailed." (By his reckoning, Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and gang "are mass murderers" who ought to be tried under the Geneva Conventions.)

The same hackneyed anti-war fodder is recycled here: that the invasion was all about oil, that it served only to enrich Vice-President Dick Cheney's friends at Halliburton, and so on. To appreciate A War Against Truth, one must accept the author's fundamental premise: that the coverage of the war in Iraq was hopelessly one-sided because the Western press was in cahoots with the invading power. In Roberts's view, the CBC and the Globe and Mail were the only media outlets in North America "not to jump on the noisy bandwagon of American jingoism."

Because of the personal tone and shrillness of Roberts's indictment, it is difficult to take this profanity-laced book seriously. Jon Lee Anderson's more level-headed and objective work is a much better read.

Adam Daifallah is a Sauve Scholar at McGill University. He reported from post-war Iraq for The New York Sun in May 2003.