Anthony Swofford whose novel Jarhead is going to be on the big screen in any day now, has an article over at the CJR discussing four recent books on the Iraq war. I have not read any of these books: War Reporting for Cowards, Over There: From the Bronx to Baghdad, My War: Killing Time in Iraq and My Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, although I am particularly intrigued by My Night Draws Near. Jessa has read War Reporting for Cowards and recommends it in the Bookslut blog today and Swofford also gives it a good recommendation. Mostly what intrigued me about this article is that such a discussion has been long overdue as have comments like those of Anthony Shadid who Swofford quotes from My Night Draws Near:
"In his prologue he [Shadid] states, 'The Americans brought a revolution without ambition and an upheaval without design.' And then he has Iraqis tell their stories for four hundred pages, allowing us to discover that he is right."
I have requested several books for review over the next couple of months that deal with Iraq and Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan?): Kabul in Winter, Come Back to Afghanistan, Places in Between and Unembedded. I'm looking forward to all of them, but I think Unembedded will be particularly interesting as it follows four photojournalists who chose not to be embedded with American troops and thus were able to give a much more open minded report of the war - something not so easy for those with American troops. (As Swofford recounts in his review of Chris Ayres's War Reporting for Cowards:)
"Ayres spends some time considering the embed process, and its end result. When the unit, lost and detached from the rest of the battalion, meets a thirsty, begging Bedouin who might also be an insurgent drawing them into an ambush, Ayres thinks, 'Just shoot him'. He recognizes this is the incorrect impulse for a war reporter. 'What I should have been thinking was “Interview him; get out and interview him.' But I was more interested in staying alive than staying objective. The trouble was, I felt like a Marine. I was about as neutral as [lance corporal] Murphy’s trigger finger.�
Alot of this goes back to what I mentioned when I wrote about Ward Just a couple of weeks ago. How can a reporter not take a side when he is with that side every single day? He/she has to be open to talking to all sides if they want to report on all sides. I'm not saying that is easy or even smart in the middle of a war zone, but it is how we learned a great deal more about the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War and it is certainly a perspective that many of us are hungry for now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm tired of hearing the Pentagon call everyone dead an insurgent.
I've been thinking alot lately about what I should be doing about this war, these wars when you think about Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm crazy frustrated about the whole thing and clearly I'm not alone since the Senate is now turning on itself in an effort to get to the bottom of it all. I remember asking my mother how she could just sit around during Vietnam and not do something and she said she was raising babies and keeping a house and taking care of a husband - she was doing something, she was busy. And I know that is true because I am raising only one child and cooking the occasional dinner and doing laundry and watching the news and saying "Oh my, how sad" just like everyone said in the 1960s when the body counts were reported by Walter Cronkite.
But I'm busy right? No - It's not enough.
I think Saddam Hussein was a bad leader, his sons were monsters and a lot of horrible things happened in Iraq. I think he should have been removed - I agree that he was a bad leader. But I read Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom earlier this year (from the infamous To Be Read Pile) and I like to think I have a decent understanding of just how complicated modern Middle Eastern history is. I know that Arabs (who did not represent a unified country as Saudi Arabia did not exist at the time) and Brits liberated the Middle Eastern portion of the Ottoman Empire from the Turks as part of WWI. They liberated Syria and then gave part of Syria - all the waterfront property in fact - to the French and renamed it Lebanon. (This was all because of agreements between Britain and France to carve up pieces of the "pie". It was very important at the end of WWI for the British and French leaders to bring something back to their people otherwise how could they justify all those dead boys in the trenches?) And then Syria itself became a protectorate of France, something they did not want. Nor did the people of Mesopotamia want to become Iraq - a protectorate of the British. And what did the people in modern Jordan or Kuwait want after they became new countries/colonies? Nothing ended up the way it was promised - nothing. And I wonder if anyone in power - anyone in the White House or the Pentagon has read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game about the battle the British and Russians fought over Afghanistan for decades (and well into the 20th century). Have they read Artyom Borovik's The Hidden War about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s? Do they remember how badly that invasion ended? Hell, have they even read Barbara Hodgson's gorgeous love story/adventure/mystery, The Lives of Shadows which is played out against the Syrian uprising against the French in the 1920s? Did you know the Syrians fought the French? Did you know that Syria had to fight to be free of all Western influence? Did you know about Lebanon and Iraq and Saudi Arabia? Does anyone know their history anymore?
And really - Barbara Hodgson's book is a novel, an illustrated novel, and I can not stress enough how gorgeous it is. Hell - read all about how much I love it over here.
All of this weighs really heavily on me and I know that in a way that is really silly because I'm just a writer in Washington State and a pretty much unpublished writer at that. But. But I can at least tell the world about books that matter - remind the world that there are books that know a truth, a very important truth. Remind everybody that if you know about the world then maybe you will not want to destroy it. Hell, I can even quote Vladimir Putin (and believe me, I am not a fan of the man) when he told Mike Wallace earlier this year that Americans need to remember that you "can not export democracy - it must come from within."
Get it?
So, I'm reading The Trouble with Tom and the British are imprisoning publishers in the early 19th century for selling copies of Tom Paine's works, for allowing the British people to know that they should have voice in their government. And in Canada, in The White and the Gold, the French Canadians have decided in the 17th century that they want the right to trap furs and sell them to customers themselves - that prices should not be set by France or the English controlled Hudson's Bay Company - that the men who do the work should have a right to sell direct to their customers. And this is ancient history in North America, but still it echoes today. You can't ignore the voices of the people in their own country, even when they are saying something you don't want to hear. You ignore them at your own peril. You ignore them at the risk of everyone.
You ignore them and 2,000 American soldiers will die in the blink of an eye and what - 50,000 Iraqis? 100,000 Iraqis? Does anyone know for sure?
Welcome to the 21st century, where we still haven't learned a damn thing. I'll keep you posted on what I'm learning at least.
