THE FALL OF BAGHDAD
by Jon Lee AndersonLittle, Brown £20 pp389
Moments after the fall of Baghdad, Jon Lee Anderson, the war reporter and writer, runs into a couple of well-dressed Iraqi men at a hotel. They ask him whether the war is over, and he says he thinks it is. The men, having just finished a takeaway, throw the paper container on the floor, apparently relieved that they will now be free. In the following days, Anderson witnesses other manifestations of the Iraqis' unexpected freedom, in the form of systematic looting on a scale the city had not seen since the Mongol invasion almost 800 years earlier. This time, however, the looting was done by the natives while the conquerors looked on bemused.
The Fall of Baghdad is not easy to pigeonhole. Part travelogue, part war reporting, it is also a summary of Iraq's recent history in the context of the Middle East's unpredictable politics — maybe all the things good journalism is about. With one touch of intelligent observation after another, Anderson paints the unreal space that Saddam Hussein created. In that space everyone, including Saddam himself, lived double lives. Most Iraqis had one overarching concern: not to run into trouble with the regime. So focused were they on this that they hardly noticed other worries of the kind that preoccupy citizens in a normal society. In that space everyone doubled as victim and oppressor. Because the Iraq war has aroused such passions, the reader will be pleasantly surprised at Anderson's ability to observe and report without a hidden agenda. Anderson does not pretend to be an expert on Iraq or on war. His journalism is free of quotes from "reliable sources speaking on condition of anonymity". And whenever he hears something outlandish — for example, rumours about the bombardment of southern Iraq with depleted uranium — he takes a cab and goes to see for himself (in this case, he found a farm with a happy man growing tomatoes).
Because he wasn't looking for headline-grabbing "stories" or "embedded" with the invading armies, Anderson was free to practise journalism of the kind that is becoming rarer by the day. At the same time, he was not looking for some battle to report, maybe because Saddam's army collapsed without fighting anything resembling a battle. He saw the war through its impact on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, on the army of reporters dispatched to Baghdad, on the hordes of humanitarians coming to do good, and on plucky peaceniks from the West volunteering to become human shields for Saddam.
For long stretches of the narrative, Anderson writes with the skill of a novelist, although the individuals and events he describes were real. Some of his characters will long be remembered. There is Ala Bashir, a plastic surgeon and surrealist artist, who could sustain a whole novel on his own. One evening, Bashir is interviewed on television in Baghdad. Saddam sees it and sends for Bashir, who fears the worst. But the despot takes a shine to the doctor and the two develop a relationship that spans a decade.
By observing the effect of events on Bashir's life over a period of years, from the gathering storms of war to the fall of Baghdad and its aftermath, Anderson offers a perceptive account of how despotism shaped and misshaped two generations of Iraqis. His rich cast of characters also includes Samir Khairy, a high official of the regime, Naji Sabri, a poseur who briefly became the foreign minister, Osama Saleh, a good doctor in a bad time, and a dozen other sympathetic rogues who appear to have lost all contact with reality.
In one interview, Tariq Aziz, a fervent Catholic and Saddam's deputy premier, compares his boss to Jesus Christ "who pardoned people who crucified him". In a scene in Fallujah, we witness Iraqis who are angry not because their country is occupied but because some of the American GIs wear earrings. "Are you a woman?" one of the Iraqis shouts at a GI, in a veritable clash of civilisations.
Thanks to Anderson's contacts with figures of the regime we learn much about Saddam. For example, he was keen on supernatural mumbo-jumbo and used a female "medium" to apply magic to compel his two sons-in-law, who had fled to Jordan and betrayed him, to return to Baghdad, where they were promptly murdered.
In the parts of the book that deal with post-liberation Baghdad, we also meet carpetbaggers, fixers, former Saddam spies offering their services to the CIA, and plain charlatans. In portraying them, Anderson is neither censorious nor cynically mocking. And it is his deadpan reporting that makes this book all the more effective. He is also a great comic writer, especially in his depiction of American reporters who, while looking for the Pulitzer-winning story, are anxious not to get killed and, more important. not to have a bad dinner two nights running.
At times, Anderson offers caricatures of men and women dragged into the confusion of post-liberation Iraq for different reasons. But even then he is never judgmental; the reader is left to draw his own conclusions. He introduces Steffa, a Californian peacenik who has spent all her savings to come to Iraq "to do something for peace", and depicts her gradual loss of innocence. We see her ending up surfing the net in a Baghdad cafe and e-mailing poems to friends back home.
Anderson also presents Ayad Jamaluddin, an exile who decides to dress up as a mullah and cash in on the American-led coalition's desire to find Shi'ite allies in Iraq. We find him taking over a mansion that had once belonged to Saddam's number two, and spending much time and money restoring it to its pre-looted glory. Ayad smokes expensive Cuban cigars and builds up his collection of luxury cars while speaking of human rights and democracy. But even then, what interests Anderson is the moral chiaroscuro that war creates, and not the castigation of a self-styled cleric.
His keen eye does not miss the quirks of the American war machine, either. We watch the world's "only superpower" getting involved in a situation that, had it not been for their human cost, would have been the stuff of burlesque. Anderson shows that the Americans, having liberated Iraq, had no clue what to do with it, and, as a result, were often taken for a ride by Iraqi charlatans and other self-styled experts. He also demonstrates how different sections of the American government fought against each other to promote rival visions, and protégés, in Iraq, and how even the US army appeared unable to impose standards of behaviour on all its personnel.
This is a great book in the best tradition of reportage, along with John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. And, though Anderson may have sympathies with one side or the other, he never allows this to come between him and the truth as he saw it in Iraq.
The Fall of Baghdad is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
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