Link Banana

Michael Massing has another great piece about Iraq in the New York Review of Books. He tells the story of Iraqi reporters working for McClatchy, one of America’s biggest news organizations, as they tell it on McClatchy’s blog, Inside Iraq. The whole piece is good, but I’ve pulled the most striking bits:

She told me that when the American soldier discovered Grisham and Asimov on her bookshelf, “He was totally amazed. When he looked at me, he didn’t see an Iraqi woman in a hijab, he saw a human being. You can’t imagine the look on his face—there were tears in his eyes. He was inside a house, with love, a family, like anywhere else.”

The incident, Sahar said, gave her a sense of the extent to which the Iraqi people are unknown. “People in America look at pictures of Afghanistan and think Iraq is the same,” she said. “They think Iraqis are people who are uneducated, who are Bedouins living in tents, tending camels and sheep.” Until the plague of wars began devouring the country, she went on, Iraq was the leading nation in the region, with a highly educated people boasting the best doctors, teachers, and engineers. Americans, Sahar sighed, “don’t know this. And when you don’t know a person, you can’t feel for them, can you?”

…

Whichever side [McClatchy’s bloggers] come down on, however, there is one feeling [about America’s presence] that predominates: humiliation. “They remind me of this constantly,” Fadel says. “Americans believe their soldiers are working for the greater good. The Iraqis don’t see that. They see people who are here for their own self-interest—who drive the wrong way on roads, who stop traffic whenever they want to, who they have to be careful not to get too close to so that they won’t be shot.” When one of her staff members wrote the post about the student who threw a rock at a US soldier, Fadel says, she asked him, “Why did this kid throw a rock at a man with a weapon, a helmet, and a vest? What was he thinking?” “These are foreign soldiers,” he replied. “This is an occupation.” That, Fadel notes, is a very common feeling among Iraqis. “Everybody I speak to thinks this. They don’t have power in their own country.”

If you’re interested in seeing — rather than reading about — life inside Iraq, I’d also recommend the slightly-old Hometown Baghdad, which I reviewed here.