Writing through the rubble

One of the reasons the United States could never win the war, Steele argues, is the ugly tactics its soldiers often used, which turned the Iraqis against them. Some of these tactics are the inevitable result of fighting a guerrilla enemy, but others are not excusable. Steele tells the story of an 11-year-old boy named Sufian Abd al-Ghani, who was arrested with his uncle and a neighbor after American troops claimed his uncle had fired at them. The American troops beat the three captives with rifle butts, according to Sufian's father, and searched the house. Although they found nothing, they placed hoods on their captives' heads and drove them away. The boy was held for 24 days and was only released thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic American captain.

"How could an 11-year-old child be held for over three weeks without anyone in authority asking questions?" Steele asks rhetorically. The answer: The United States had made no plans for how to police Iraq.

Some of the brutal behavior was due to the U.S. military's insistence on "force protection" above all else, which led to hundreds of innocent Iraqis being killed at checkpoints or on the street. But Steele has the courage to point out that Islamophobia and racism, which stemmed from the very nature of Bush's war, played a major role. "Politicians in Washington may have been referring to Iraqis as a 'liberated people' but, with a few individual exceptions, US soldiers and officers behaved as though they were a conquered enemy. Given that a majority of Americans thought Saddam was linked to the attacks of 9/11, many soldiers saw the occupation as 'payback time.' ... Bush's war on terror had ... created a general sense of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia, which devalued Arab lives."

One of the most interesting, and audacious, aspects of Steele's book is its insistence that Arab culture played a critical role in the U.S. defeat. "The Bush administration did not understand that Arabs feel great sensitivity to assaults on their honour, dignity, and independence, especially by Westerners."

This blind spot is ironic, considering that the central role played by shame and honor in Arab culture is an important part of the theories of the best-known neoconservative intellectual, Bernard Lewis, who has argued that Arab/Muslim humiliation over their failure to keep up with the West is the driving force behind Islamist radicalism. There's some truth in this. But in part because Lewis denied that Arabs had any real grievances against the West, he drew a fatefully wrong conclusion, believing that a good kick in the face would do the Arab world good.

In fact, this approach, which hid the quasi-racist mantra "Arabs understand only force" beneath a multiculturally correct veneer, was the worst possible strategy. And Americans should have known this. Steele writes, "If analogies were relevant when Washington's war planners prepared their attack on Iraq, it was Israel and Palestine that should have been the template, not Germany or Japan. Sending US and British troops to occupy an Arab country in the 21st century was bound to be as difficult as it has been for Israeli troops to occupy the West Bank for the last 40 years."

The Iraq war failed because of ignorance born of arrogance. Until the American establishment -- both the government and the mainstream media -- tries to actually understand the Middle East, its history, its culture and its people, America's policies in the region are doomed to keep failing. This book is a good place to start. -- Gary Kamiya

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Shortly after the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, rumors spread among the local populace that the sunglasses of U.S. soldiers were specially engineered to see through women's clothing. To counter this propaganda, a young Iraqi-American lawyer named Haider Ala Hamoudi borrowed sunglasses from an American sergeant and passed them around to local children, then to a scandalized Iraqi elder, who recoiled and cried: "I take refuge in Allah from the wiles of Satan!"

At some point, it seems, the clash of civilizations must devolve into sitcom. Although if "Howling in Mesopotamia," Hamoudi's memoir of life outside the Green Zone, resembles anything, it's a Middle East update of "Our Town," with small-town rituals somehow surviving amid the ruins.

Hot today ... You can already smell the sewage. Someone round the corner's shootin' off an AK-47. Oh, and up on the roof, there's Omar the Crazy Palestinian, sayin' it's jihad time. Down the street comes Cousin Ali, lookin' mighty peeved. Seems those American boys went and shot out the transmission of his Brazilian Volkswagen....

All in all, Baghdad is a sadder sort of town than Grover's Corners: electricity spotty, roads unpaved, telephones in disrepair, long lines for gasoline, and, since the United States has cordoned off a big hunk of the central city for its own purposes, monster traffic jams. Did we mention the constant threat of death? Even a trip to the local Italian restaurant is fraught with danger, so most of the city's residents retreat to their television sets, where they enjoy the weird thrall of seeing their own country's affairs play across multiple channels.

Hamoudi's U.S. citizenship gives him access to the other side of the checkpoints, where he gets to hear Coalition Provisional Authority officials declare: "We know how to build countries. We are experts at that." In one richly metaphoric moment, U.S. soldiers seize contraband gasoline from black-market traders and pour it into the streets of Baghdad, giving Islamic terrorists a perfect opportunity to set the city on fire.

So how did a nice second-generation Iraqi-American from Columbus, Ohio, end up in the belly of this beast? By his own testimony, Haider Ala Hamoudi went to Baghdad in July 2003 for an Iraqi reason -- to draft new laws for the post-Saddam government -- and also for what might crassly be called an American reason: to make a shitload of money.

"Naively," he writes, "I imagined investors pumping large streams of capital into this oil-rich and undeveloped land, and I knew well their first rule when making investments in such areas -- get a lawyer." Except potential investors are scared away by suicide bombers, and as for creating a "brave new legal world in Iraq" -- well, "Howling in Mesopotamia" is, finally, a fever chart of Hamoudi's disillusionment.

April 2004: "The occupation had failed." A short while later: "In spite of the terrorism, in spite of the American blunders, in spite of the crime and the hate and the war and the death and the looting, and in spite of the obvious, I still believed." A couple of months on: "Human beings could not live here." And after the January 2005 elections: "Iraq as a nation had failed, it had been carved up into fiefs, each controlled by a combination of chiefs, clerics, militias, and tribal elders."

When Hamoudi is at last offered a role in shaping the new government's constitution, he flatly declines, pleading exhaustion. "I could spare nothing more for this country. I had done what I could, for as long as I could, and could bear no more duty, no more despair, no more unhappiness. I had to leave. I had to live."

Which is to say: live without fear. The American side of him wins out, after all, and if anything keeps "Howling in Mesopotamia" from being a more stirring testament, it's the reader's sense that Hamoudi is ready and able at every moment to flee.

And in fact he does: takes a fellowship at Columbia Law School and heads back home with his new Iraqi wife. The choices he made -- leaving Baghdad, for instance, for the relative safety of Kurdistan -- are perfectly understandable in human terms, but they also reinforce his position of privilege and leave fissures in the cast of his martyrdom. Surely, the disenchantment of one Ivy League lawyer matters far less than the fate of the people he left behind, the men and women who, in Hamoudi's telling, are not just howling but enduring, in expected and unexpected ways. -- Louis Bayard

Next page: Champion of a free Iraq or instigator of the war?