This is from the latest edition of New York Review of Books' review on her latest compilation of blogs:
The simple statement—"we should listen to Iraqi voices"—poses a crucial question. In our search for authentically Iraqi viewpoints, whom should we be listening to? Who can claim to speak for the citizens of a country where the barriers to understanding— following differences in religious belief, ethnicity, class—are so forbiddingly complex? In the case of Riverbend, it happens, it is also the mistakes of the young Baghdad woman, her limitations, that make her narrative worth reading. The daughter of an upper-middle-class family, she is a progressive Muslim and an idealistic Iraqi nationalist, intent on demonstrating to her American readers the high level of Iraq's cultural and economic development. And yet she is also distinctly oblivious to some of the darker sides of Saddam's regime.<7> "Some would say that they had complete rights even before the war," she notes at one point, in a characteristic moment of blindness (she has apparently never heard of the poison gas attacks Saddam's regime staged against Kurdish civilians). "The majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions," she argues elsewhere. She decries American policies that seem to her aimed at dividing Iraqis into ethnic and sectarian communities, and makes a great point of emphasizing the mixed Sunni-Shia origins of her family.
As the story progresses, though, reality begins to catch up. Suddenly Shiites are taking to the streets with their deeply traditional rituals of mourning and self-chastisement, which had been prohibited by Saddam's government. For Riverbend it is a jarring sight:
These processions were banned before and, quite frankly, I wish they could be confined to certain areas now. The sight of so much violence (even if it is towards oneself) is just a little bit unnerving.
So much for her Shia roots. By the same token, she is notably contemptuous of Shiite representatives who have risen to new power and prestige under the occupation. She is particularly scornful of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq—SCIRI, the Iranian-influenced Shiite party in Iraq—which she dismisses with some plausibility as an Iranian proxy. But she neglects to note that its leaders include clerics who command the allegiance of large numbers of the Shiite population. She is equally dismissive of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the senior spiritual authority for most of Iraq's Shiites, whom she scorns simply as an "Iranian." Such contempt, like that of many Iraqis who share her beliefs, completely misjudges the profound impact of the national elections sponsored by the occupation authorities. Before they took place she predicted they would be a fig leaf for American power—when in fact they ended up providing a galvanizing moment for many of those who voted.
In this misjudgment, Riverbend reminds me of those Soviet patriots who failed to understand the events that ushered in the final agony of the USSR. Many of those who lived well under the system were unable to see its crimes for what they were, making them dismissive or uncomprehending when the once-oppressed began to express their own political demands. The situations are not entirely dissimilar. In 2003, the American-led coalition entered an Iraq that had just completed a century of colonization, rebellion, social unrest, endless coups (marked by the public murder of political leaders), and authoritarian government even before the Baath Party ascended to power briefly in 1963 and then, more enduringly, in July 1968. After Saddam gained the presidency in July 1979, the country embarked on a twenty-four-year-period of totalitarian rule. The disastrous events of this era included the eight-year war with Iran (characterized by savage trench combat of a type not seen since World War I); genocidal attacks on the Kurds (including the use of chemical weaponry against Iraqi citizens); political terror targeting the Shiite spiritual leadership and religious institutions; the invasion of Kuwait and Saddam's defeat in Operation Desert Storm; and twelve years of postwar sanctions that pauperized much of the population and severely debilitated Iraq's once-envied social infrastructure. All too often attempts to deal with the effects of this history were driven underground by the state's ban on political discussion, furthering a process of atomization that has resulted, on countless levels, in a society that no longer knows itself. Both Shadid and Nir Rosen, in his book In the Belly of the Green Bird, note in passing that many of the Sunni Arab Iraqis they encounter during their reporting firmly believe, for example, that Sunnis make up 60 percent of the population.
Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
by Christian Caryl
Christian Caryl is the Tokyo Bureau Chief of Newsweek. He has reported from thirty-five countries, including Russia, Afghanistan, and North Korea; he recently returned from Iraq. (January 2007)
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