“Uncovering Iraq: Reporting in War and Its Aftermath”

Journalism & the Arab World Conference
The University of Texas at Austin
Saturday, April 23, 2005

I was invited here to talk about Iraq . I'm always a little reluctant to do so. One, I don't consider myself a pundit, and I'm not really an analyst. The best thing about journalism is that we let other people do the talking and then try to capture what they say. But I guess I do have the virtue of having spent a lot of time there, as a journalist, and that's the direction in which I want to take the talk today.

I first went to Baghdad in 1998, when I was reporter for the Associated Press. I went again in October 2002, as a correspondent with the Boston Globe. In January 2003, I joined the Washington Post. Now, my introduction there amounted to basically a few days of training on the computer and then a one-way ticket to the Middle East . I made it to Baghdad in March, a couple weeks before the war. I stayed there during the war, and then reported there pretty much continuously for the next year or so. Took a break to write a book and found myself back there in November until about, hmm, eight days ago.

What did I know going in? To be honest, not much.

That could be a misleading question. Someone could ask me now, What do you know about Iraq ? Not much, maybe even less than I thought I knew when I was going in. And, in a lot of ways, that's probably the best conclusion that I've come to over my time there.

What I think I learned as a reporter in Iraq was how complicated the country actually was. And I want to start the talk recounting a few interviews I've had with some people that I met before or during the war and stayed in touch with through the aftermath. Most of them, in one way or another, are friends now. They all represent different perspectives.

And, most importantly, they all surprise me.

Raad

The first conversation took place during my first visit to Iraq .

It was 1998, and Iraq was a really ragged place. Attempted coups against Saddam, crises over Iraq 's repeated obstruction of U.N. weapons inspections and confrontations every two years or so with the United States had pretty much secured its place in the eyes of the international community. At the time, many Iraqis told me they would shake their heads as they heard the name of their country, night after night, lead the popular, Arabic-language bulletins of the BBC. The sense of crisis seemed never-ending, and its relentlessness created a short-hand that made Iraq understandable to the rest of the world: It was America against Saddam, Saddam as a dictator, its people repressed. The categories were easy to define, easy to understand and they were largely true. But in my visit in 1998, I kept stumbling on scenes that were surprising to me. They suggested a nuance that I didn't expect before I arrived. Sometimes they were whispers, other times they were shouts, and each complicated the portrait that I had of the country.

A conversation I had with a man named Raad was one of those moments. I met him briefly on December 3, 1998, as I was walking through the covered market in Baghdad , a modest place known as Suq al-Saray. His cramped shop was in the quarter dedicated to copper, a carnival of clanging metal. I was alone, finally. Using the pretense of shopping, I was able to lose my official escort, known as a minder, and I was reveling in the sense of anonymity. I stepped into a stall, and my accent unleashed a conversation. Why do I speak Egyptian Arabic if I'm Lebanese? What passport do I hold? Raad asked.

And then he mentioned Saddam. He didn't say “the Leader,” not his excellency the president, not even his full name. Just Saddam. The name rolled off his tongue dismissively. In the rest of the world, there are elections, he said. People elsewhere can throw out governments that are bad. Here, that's impossible. “The people are prisoners of the regime.” I remember smiling faintly. Is he trying to bait me? Why would he say this?

But, as he talked, I realized that his disdain of Saddam did not translate into adoration of the United States . He did not look to America as his savior. He suggested that the United States wanted to keep Iraq down. Fear drove its policy, he said, and it feared Iraq 's potential. Then, he speculated that America actually supported Saddam. He suggested that it wasn't America versus Saddam. Rather, it was America and Saddam lined up against the Iraqi people. This was Raad's view, and in those brief, conspiratorial few minutes that we talked, he spoke like a lawyer preparing a brief. How else could I explain the U.S. support for Iraq during the war with Iran , when the Reagan administration provided Saddam some arms and, more importantly, battlefield intelligence from spy satellites? He pointed to the 1991 Gulf War and what many Iraqis considered an American green light to the invasion of Kuwait the year before. He asked how I could explain U.N. sanctions, which were backed by the United States . Over the decade, they had devastated Iraq 's population, making most of its people dependent almost entirely on government-distributed food rations, while leaving Saddam stronger than before. Iraqis, the people Saddam ruled, had nothing to do with the invasion of Kuwait , nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. “And,” Raad said, “we are paying the price of the embargo.” I remembered hurrying back to the hotel, my eyes darting around the street, and scribbling down the notes from memory.

Mohamed Hayawi

There was another moment in the same market. I was on Mutanabi Street , a nearby stretch of bookstores and stationery shops in Old Baghdad that is as storied as it is narrow. For a generation or more, the street served as the capital's intellectual entrepot. Under sanctions, it embodied its plight. Its stores were lined with magazines twenty years old, textbooks from another generation and dust-covered religious tomes that seemed more for show than for sale. More often than not, the street was a dreary, depressing flea market for used books. Vendors were selling off their private collections in a desperate attempt to get by. I was again alone. And a little bored, I walked into one of the street's biggest and best-known shops. It was the Renaissance Bookstore, a place I would visit again and again while I was in Iraq .

Outside the shop was a copy of Business Week from June 29, 1987. “Who's Afraid of IBM?” the cover read. I remembered shaking my head. Inside was Mohammed Hayawi, a bald, bear of a man who was perpetually unshaven. Ours was another chance encounter, but like Raad, he seized the opportunity to talk.

Iraq 's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was wrong, he told me, quite boldly. That was a blasphemous idea in the prevailing theology of Saddam. As an Arab, he said, he was embarrassed by the idea of an Arab country attacking another Arab country. As a Muslim, he was ashamed of a war that pitted co-religionists. And he was still angry at Saddam for doing it. In fact, looking back, he could even understand the justification for the 1991 Gulf War, when U.S. troops attacked Iraq after the invasion. But now? Like others, he said he could not understand the American obsession with Iraq and Saddam. Why the crisis after crisis? He listed possible justifications, then explained them away. For weapons of mass destruction? We don't have any. If we did, he declared, we would have fired them at Israel . For our leader? What, he asked, does he have to do with us?

Faruq Ziada

Let me fast forward to five years later. It was during the war, the third or fourth day if I recall, and I was invited by an acquaintance to spend a day with his family in Baghdad . I thought at the time, it was an amazing, almost breathtaking gesture of hospitality.

We sat around the table, which they had moved into a crowded room with fewer windows. It was a lavish meal -- spicy pickled mango, kibba , kufta , chicken cooked with rice, peanuts and raisins and a thin bread known as raqqaq. Great meal!

And at the head of the table was a man named Faruq Ahmed Saadeddin. Next to him was his son Omar. Now Faruq was a 65-year-old urbane, former diplomat from the northern city of Mosul . He had served in embassies in Iran , Japan , China , and, in his longest stint, the United States . He was educated at the University of Arizona . I'm still in touch with him, and I consider him a man of dignity and honor. He's a defiant nationalist who likes to speak his mind. His 32-year-old son is no different. Perhaps a little brasher, a little more militant, but no less intelligent.

As we ate, the sound of bombs outside, I remember that Faruq and Omar spoke with remarkable candor about politics, a subject that I had hardly broached in Iraq to that point. At times brashly, they discussed what was usually whispered. Faruq was a critic of Saddam, whom he called rash. He and Omar still bitterly complained about his decision to invade Kuwait in 1990, bringing on the virtual destruction of the Iraqi military in the Gulf War, save the Republican Guard that ensured Saddam's survival. After the war, as the Iraqi army was pummeled as it fled along the road from Kuwait to the southern city of Basra , a stretch the Americans nicknamed the “Highway of Death,” they said they were ready to overthrow Saddam themselves. They had taken pride in the military, and they were angry at the way Saddam sacrificed it. “We felt he humiliated it,” I remember Omar telling me.

Then I remember these words from Faruq. “ Iraq is ready for change,” he told me. “The people want it, they want more freedom.”

But both of the men converged in their denunciations of the very rationale of the American invasion. To them, the assault was an insult. It was not Saddam under attack, but Iraq , and they insisted that pride and patriotism prevented them from putting their destiny in the hands of another country. Here's what Faruq said to me that day: “We complain about things but complaining doesn't mean cooperating with foreign governments. When somebody comes to attack Iraq , we stand up for Iraq . That doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities.”

I remember that Fox News was on in the background. To Faruq and Omar, that was the sentiment of real America , and they watched it as long as electricity lasted. Together, we listened to the reports on the war. Then Faruq said words to me that I don't think I'll ever forget.

“Either you're with us or you're with Saddam Hussein,” he complained. “You have a problem,” he said. He was addressing the U.S. government. “You don't understand.”

“There are rumblings. But these rumblings don't mean come America , we'll throw flowers at you.”

Abu Firas

The last conversation that I wanted to recount was also during the war. It was with a man named Fuad Musa Mohammed. A retired psychiatrist, I usually called him Dr. Fuad. His son, Firas, who was doing his medical residency in Baltimore , was an acquaintance of my family. He had reached me by my satellite phone in Baghdad and asked that I check on his father. In the last week of the war, I did.

Our first conversation unfolded to the backdrop of the fighting. Artillery thundered in the distance. I remember its regularity made it a little less threatening. Planes swept overhead – each run making for suspense as you waited for the explosion. In the background there was gunfire. I was scared to death. Not Dr. Fuad. Even then, I remember, he was exuberant and optimistic. I found him to be filled with resilience, an indomitable sense of self that left him his integrity under Saddam.

He was there at his house alone. He had sent his wife to Beirut during the war. Two of his daughters were across town and Firas, of course, was in the United States . We sat in the dark – electricity was out by this time – and talked about what was ahead.

“We've had enough,” he told me. “Really, we've had enough.”

It was one of those jaw-dropping conversations, much like the first one I mentioned to you, the one with Raad. Dr. Fuad despised the government. As a Shiite Muslim, he listed the crimes of his government – exiling tens of thousands of fellow Shiites to Iran in the 1970s and 1980s, its brutal rule, eight years of war with Iran and then an invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Iraq 's resources and wealth were squandered, he said, and its people were deprived, spiritually and materially.

I'm quoting him again. “We hate this person,” he said. “We want him off of us. He's not only a dictator, but he's given nothing to the people.”

Fuad was the kind of Iraqi that the United States had hoped to encounter once in Baghdad . While proud of his country, he had none of the reflexive nationalism of Faruq and Omar. The war was against Saddam, he said, not Iraq .

But as much as he anticipated Saddam's fall, even longed for it, he knew the American promises of liberation and democracy were not being made in a vacuum. There was a context – perhaps created by Saddam but still present nevertheless. And the context of history, its legacies and its resentments, seen through a psychiatrist's eyes, was dangerous. He predicted that Baghdad would wait to see American intentions, but that the window of opportunity would be precariously brief.

“I like America , really,” he told me. “I like the American way of life. I like democracy and everything it offers. But at the same time, we don't know.”

I remember he shook his head. I'm quoting him again. “If they say OK, this is your country, we can give you all that you need, and then we'll leave, that would be great. But when you hear that American generals are coming to govern Iraq and that it will last one year, two years, three years, six months, this view, when you explain it to simple people, the majority, that will be very difficult. They can't digest it.”

“If they're honest from the start,” the Americans he meant, “it will be different.” Then listen to this line: “But if the military comes here for one year, just guess what will happen. I may understand it,” he told me, “but the majority won't.”

**

To me, these conversations were fleeting but subversive moments, and they spoke to that swath of gray that, despite the veneer of monochromatic repression, colored Baghdad in those years. They defied our expectations and they defied our perceptions of what Iraq was.

What do I mean by that?

In those days, repression in Iraq had become self-perpetuating. I suspect that no one ordered the posting of the vast majority of Saddam's portraits that littered the city for two decades. Obsequiousness has a momentum of its own. Make the repression white-hot, and a culture of intimidation will be created in its wake. Iraq was the most dramatic example of tyranny, but I think the same phenomenon occurred in Syria and Egypt over their long decades of authoritarianism.

Expectations create fear. Fear dictates behavior. It is the discipline of terror, a diffuse, universalized threat.

In Baghdad , I think it was easy to understand that dynamic. Repression, after all, was the presupposition that we as journalists brought to our coverage of Iraq , ruled as it was by one of the world's most sinister governments. Time and again, that premise would blind us, though. Seeing a society through the lens of repression left the nuances of Iraqi society out of focus. All journalists there, myself among them, had trouble understanding the exceptions to the rule, exceptions that perhaps revealed the most enlightening facts of Iraq's complexity – the sentiments, passions and legacies that shape a society, even in the most repressive eras. We didn't listen to people like Raad, Mohammed Hayawi, Faruq and Dr. Fuad. If we had, they would have showed us that there was much to Iraqi identity beyond Saddam's dictatorship.

There was reflection and courage in Raad and in Mohammed Hayawi. Neither were devoted to Saddam, nor were they admirers of the United States . They were members of a group defined by ambivalence and ambiguity. Those are perhaps the most difficult sentiments to chronicle as a journalist.

Faruq and Fuad. They were two men on opposite sides of the fence. For Faruq, the invasion was an insult. To Fuad, it was a liberation. But they both saw a context, they both worried what was ahead. They saw beyond a perception of Iraq as fabulously repressive place, bordered by terror. They saw it as a country with a history, traditions, culture and pride, and they knew what an occupation meant to it.

I heard these conversations and reported parts of them, but looking back, I don't know if I listened. At worst, I fell for my expectations – repression that blinded me to nuance, words like Raad's that seemed so reckless as to defy credibility. At best, I saw ambiguity. On reflection, it was ambiguity that came closest to truth in those days.

And ambiguity is something that we too often dismiss.

The problem wasn't only with journalists either.

Intentions aside, whether they were idealistic or nefarious, the United States never understood Iraq , and I don't think it yet does. Time and again, we envisioned a city and country disciplined by this unrelenting terror, a one-dimensional portrait of submission and victimization. In part, this was true. Yet Iraq and its capital – proud but humbled, rebellious but humiliated – were – I now think – less like a black-and-white picture and more like a weathered sculpture, hewn in part by its proud past. That history haunts it; its present mocks what it once had. The sculpture is crafted, too, by the legacy of modern conflict and its consequences: the war with Iran , the decade-long sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait , and Saddam's three-decade rule that left the capital brutalized and immiserated, a shadow of what it was even a generation before.

That appreciation was always missing from the debate. Before the war and even as the bombs fell, I felt, in a way, that Iraq had become its own theater. It was an actor on a grand stage, its performance interpreted and re-interpreted but perhaps never understood.

For other Arabs, Iraq was a symbol, a player in the grander drama. It was the latest victim of American power, the latest instrument of conspiracy. For the Americans, that same Iraq – the Arab world's potentially most powerful state – was a potential beacon of change in the region. There was an ideological bent to the invasion that ran as deep, perhaps deeper, than the warnings of the threat posed by Iraq 's suspected weapons of mass destruction or the danger of Saddam. If we can change Iraq , they believed, we can change the Arab world. In the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the way for America to fight terrorists was “to drain the swamp they live in.” The rhetoric – idealistic to Western ears, rife with century-old colonialism for a Third World audience – envisioned the dawn of a democratic and just Arab world, guided by a benevolent United States . Neither the Arab world nor the United States anticipated the ambiguity of Baghdad and, by extension, Iraq . It was inconvenient. Baghdad was once again transformed into an idea, which stood for reality. It became a rallying cry, a field for others' ambitions and grievances, and in a dangerous conceit, they claimed to speak on its behalf. In the contest of perceptions, Iraq was passive, its future in others' hands.

When I look back on the coverage of Iraq over the past couple of years, that narrative in particular strikes me. That narrative was the almost relentless determination of others to speak on behalf of Iraqis themselves.

Liberation was one thing to America , another to Iraqis. To many Americans, it represented the end of their struggle with Saddam. To Iraqis, it marked a beginning, one still being defined. The same went for occupation. Even the word stood on opposite ends of a divide. To Americans, I suspect, it conjured up images of post-World War 2 Europe. To the Arab world, it was an ihtilal, a word that suggests less Marshall Plan and more Apaches engaged in battle against Palestinians in the West Bank . Democracy was no less a divide. To many of us, it was vindication of the Bush administration, a decisive step toward a democratic future for Iraq . Perhaps. But I saw something slightly different in the streets of Baghdad that day three months ago. I saw a celebration not over choosing a particular party or platform that would guide the country – after all, the essence of elections – but rather a euphoric celebration of rights long denied. To many the election itself was what mattered, that their very participation would set in motion a mechanism that would improve their lives. In some ways, the joy seemed even more palpable than after Saddam's fall. Iraqis, not foreigners, were the agents of change, of taking matters into their own hands. Do those two perspectives overlap? Indeed, they do. But they remain different perspectives.

I often think that we as journalists rely too much on authority or, perhaps more precisely, the perception of authority. In the journalism that we've grown accustomed to in Washington , that may be unavoidable. The workings of a government, the debate over policy, and the nature of campaigns and electoral politics – the very logistics of reporting revolve around a certain relationship to power and authority. That doesn't, however, apply to foreign correspondence. We can define our work more broadly. In a way, the best of international reporting is interpretive. The best of international reporting relies on voices, perspectives, frustrations and hopes, knit together by a context of history and its legacy. The best of international reporting relies on interviews. Through those interviews, we can avoid the danger of an overemphasis on officialdom – people can define the story for themselves. They can allow journalists to say we don't know the answer, perhaps there is no answer, perhaps the situation is ambiguous. That in itself is probably the answer.

Those interviews, however, are the biggest challenge in covering Iraq before the war, even during it. And still today, they remain forbidding.

Iraq is a dangerous place. For Iraqis, of course. But for journalists, too. Newspaper journalists, many of whom prided themselves on working low to the ground, have begun openly debating whether or not they should adopt television's tactic of riding with armed security or providing weapons to their drivers. Houses have become fortified. Hotels where journalists work are often behind two-story concrete barricades, their entrances manned by checkpoints with U.S. soldiers guard dogs or contracted security. We're cut off from the very city we cover. The psychological barriers are my greatest fear; they are the greatest challenge to understanding Iraq 's complexity. The question that should be asked is: What happens when we are ignorant of how a city feels, how a city responds, how it reacts – its very energy. Will we make the same mistakes we've already made? What happens when we're forced to rely on others to define the experience in Iraq ? What happens when officialdom tells us what the story is and, by virtue of our lack of choices, we rely on it as the truth?

Lastly and most importantly, is there any way around it? I don't know. But the question worries me. I worry that we won't hear what's being said. And when we do, I fear we'll listen for the black and white rather than the gray. And the gray, like I've said, is what's best about our profession.

I think back to my friend, Mohammed Hayawi. I saw him again after the election. He was a a Sunni Arab, part of a community that largely boycotted the vote out of fear or principle. He was uncertain whether he would vote until the day itself.

“It was like someone inviting me to lunch. I can't say no,” he told me, a little meekly. “If you say no, this is disrespectful.”

I sat with Hayawi at his cluttered desk. His words poured out, uninhibited, as was his custom. “I knew that the paper I put in the ballot box was for America . I know I was being hypocritical. But there was no other choice,” he said, waving his cigarette between his fingers. “The future of Iraq is a line that goes through the occupation. If you asked me why I was voting, it's because I want to find something to pull me out of this mud.” He looked out his window, emblazoned with an Iraqi flag. “Maybe this is the rope that will save us.”

Two years on, his complaints remained: lines for gasoline in a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; less electricity than a year ago; his suspicion that foreigners were taking the profits from oil, whose production hovered at prewar levels.

But little else – neither past nor future – was conclusive.

There is a wall in Baghdad that Hayawi passes every day to work, right before the Sarafiya Bridge . A slogan celebrating the fallen Iraqi leader has faded, leaving only his name. A leaflet by followers of a young militant cleric, Muqtada Sadr, intones, “Be an enemy of the oppressor.” Partially blotted out is another slogan that declares, “Death to the lackeys.” Across the street is a promise to Shiites' most beloved saint, Imam Hussein: “If you cut off our legs and hands, we will come to you crawling.” Election posters linger, promising “to revive what was destroyed by the criminal Baath regime.” Nearby them is a heap of tin cans, plastic bags, wet orange peels and flies, underneath an injunction to keep the city clean. His views over what was ahead that day were like the wall itself. They collided and intersected, contradicted and agreed. They were gray. He sanctioned attacks on U.S. soldiers – like most Sunnis, he considered that part of the insurgency legitimate resistance. But he recoiled at the car bombs and suicide attacks against Iraqi police and civilians, whose deaths are far more numerous. He worried about the growing sectarian and ethnic cast to the country, perhaps the most lasting legacy of the U.S.-supported political process in Iraq . He was Sunni, but did not identify himself as such. The sectarian focus, to him, was the equivalent of all politics in the United States being refracted through the lens of race relations. It was there, but did not explain everything.

There's a word that I have heard time and again as a reporter in Iraq . It is ghamidh, and it means mysterious and ambiguous. It is word that has come to define Iraq to me, and my experience there. It is a word that Mohammed understood and uses often. I mentioned the wall to him that day, and he leaned back in his chair, nodding.

The future? Ghamidh, he agreed. He puffed his cigarette, then challenged my assumptions. “I challenge anyone to say what has happened, what’s happening now and what will happen in the future,” he said. He shook his head. He fell quiet after saying those words. Then his lips tightened into a smile that was ambiguous.