I love the way Shadid let's his interviewees speak for themselves. He doesn't editorialize the hell out it. This book is the best inside look at the disparate views that Iraqis hold toward the US invasion and occupation and how they have evolved. We love to lump all of them into one nice and neat group and think of them as for us or against us, peaceful or blood thirsty. Iraq is so complex and the administration had no idea what they were getting into. It is amusing to go back to 2003 and read quotes from the likes of Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush about Iraq. What an ignorant bunch of warmongering bastards.

It would be easy to boil down the Iraq war as overthrowing a dictator and freeing the Iraqi people, thus putting the US as heroes. Though that was certainly part of the reasoning, it is important to look back with 20/20 hindsight. Did we have a net positive or negative effect on the country? Have we learned anything about future wars? Are there better ways to topple bad rulers?

This book is about getting to know Iraqi people, their hopes, their frustrations, and their fears. Fairly well written and certainly needed.

Essential reading for anyone under 30 because wow I really had no idea. Also probably essential reading for any millennial or gen x who thinks the war was “wrong” but can’t articulate why they think it was wrong.

During the reign of the tyrant Saddam Hussein it was one group of Iraqi muslims (the Sunnis) lording it over the other groups of Iraqi muslims (the Kurds and the Shiites). And there were a lot of deaths and suffering.

When Saddam waged war against Iran, there were a lot of deaths and suffering too on both sides.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, he incurred the wrath of the USA which had to free not only Kuwait, but Iraq itself from Saddam’s cruel rule. An added justification was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which threaten the west but this turned out not to be true later.

Saddam’s army didn’t put up much of a fight. Only his two sons who were killed. Saddam hid for a while but was later captured in a small hole on the ground. Not too long after that, he was executed.

Some Iraqis welcomed the Americans as liberators. Many hailed the fall of Saddam. But disillusionment set in when peace and order and basic services were not restored sooner, There were bombings and suicide bombings most likely by Iraqis killing mostly Iraqis. The apparent aim was to create enough mayhem to drive the Americans and their Iraqi collaborators out of Iraq.

The Iraqis are probably one of the most religious people in the world and one with the strongest faith in God. They always have God on their lips. To fight a hopeless battle where death is certain, to blow yourself up in a suicide bombing mission, these they do with ease. A father would be more proud than sad if a son of his dies this way. Having a “martyr” in the family is a lasting honor.

If you do not believe in the muslim God and his prophet Muhammad then you are an infidel. Killing infidels in defence of the muslim faith is good. Being killed by infidels makes you a martyr. You go straight to heaven .

Never can they imagine a world without a God who needs their protection and for whom they ought to kill and get killed.

More like three and a half.

So I should probably review this before I forget everything. I avoided reading journalist or new political books about the last Iraq war for a really long time and I can't really remember what made me pick this one up. I've always enjoyed Shadid's articles, which I first became familiar with around 2006, and this book covers from just before the start of the war upto the elections of 2005.

Some parts of this are really touching. My favourite is the prologue right before the war started, the people trying to find out about their missing sons that turned into a protest that seemed eerily familiar and sad after the events of the last year. He also goes into a lot of detailed stories about the Iran-Iraq war which is good since it had hundreds of thousands of casualties yet has been largely forgotten. Its impact on the state and people was massive. I just wish he had put the same kind of detail into talking about the 1991 war, the uprisings which the US left to get crushed, and the decade plus of sanctions that followed. The sanctions alone killed way more people than the last two wars put together, but they should not be covered just for that reason, but because it's really important to understanding the state that Iraq was in in 2003.

Once he gets into the war itself we get the perspective of a lot of Iraqis from a lot of very different backgrounds with very different opinions. For the most part they get to speak for themselves and you get to see how they change (or not) as things go from bad to worse, much of the book has the same feel as the (excellent) documentary "About Baghdad." Out of this you get the major disconnect between Iraqis and the American rhetoric, that Iraqis have a much longer memory. Like when the Americans say they were going to make Iraq function "like before," they meant before they invaded, while Iraqis thought that meant like in the 1970s, before Saddam and before the wars and sanctions that devastated them. More discussion of the 1990s would have helped to clarify how destroyed everything was by the time the war came around.

Also, and Shadid is not alone in this by a long shot but it's still unfortunate, he draws this dichotomy of Saddam's rule as secular and that religious parties only came after his fall. The guy was never secular, especially not in the 1990s. It's a minor point but in general people have to stop calling every dictator that dresses up in military fatigues secular cause they almost never are.

Ultimately I opted to give this book a 3 instead of 4 because it didn't tell me much that I didn't know. If you followed the papers and read the in depth articles of the time, the kind of profiles written here will sound pretty familiar to you. That's because the best pieces were either by Shadid or by people that were imitating him, but that doesn't change that it took away from my overall reading experience.

Perspective of an Arabic speaking US born journalist who covers the war in Iraq, interviews families there, and shares the feelings and needs of the Iraqi people.

Shadid has created a tremendous piece of journalism with this book. There are tons of fascinating and outstanding books on the early period of the Iraq War, but none that I've read provide such a incisive and deep account of how Iraqis experienced and understood the conflict. Shadid's courageous journalism, his ability to speak Arabic, and his ability to blend in (to some extent) with Iraqis made this book possible.

Ultimately this book gets at a population that is physically and psychologically damaged. The book reveals all manner of contradictory beliefs, but also shows how ordinary Iraqi lives improved very little in the aftermath of the US invasion. He shows the progressive turn to religious extremism in response to the collapse of multiple authorities in Iraq, from the Baath Party to traditional religious authorities. Overall, this turn was harmful and counterproductive, especially for the Iraqis themselves. I must have drawn a few dozen question marks in this book at the simply illogical and conspiratorial beliefs of many Iraqis, but the more you learn the history of the country the more you see the reasons behind this.

Let me give one example: The US clearly got Iraqi hopes up before its invasion. Iraqis expected a marked improvement in their daily lives after Saddam, but the US did not deliver for a variety of reasons well-documented in other books. Iraqis often found it impossible to believe that a country of such immense power and wealth, a country that put the man on the moon, could fail to provide basic services and security to the people of Iraq. Many began to think that the US wasn't even trying to do this, or that they were actively trying to harm or drain resources from the Iraqi people. Add these conspiratorial beliefs to the xenophobia, tribalism, and religious bigotry already on the rise in the country, and you had a seriously dangerous brew that erupted in civil war and insurgency. Trying to get inside the minds of the people whose countries the US has occupied in recent years is becomingly increasingly interesting to me. I will admit that it is hard to put away my tendency to judge and really try to understand their history and thinking.

I will say, however, that this book confirms my belief that the growth of religious fundamentalism in the region and especially in conflict zones has been one of the worst possible trends for the stability, prosperity, and democratization of the region. There is a deep irrationality to the statements and actions of so many Iraqis in this book that can mostly be tied to religious extremism and that made reconstruction and reconciliation nearly impossible. A more chilled-out, liberal, tolerant approach to religion would have been hugely beneficial here. This is certainly my personal and cultural bias emerging, but I welcome any ideas about how I might be wrong.

Solid (if now slightly outdated) look at the state of Iraq, from a perspective Westerners don't normally get. Felt a lot more knowledgeable about Arabic/Islamic history and mindset after reading this.

This is a compilation of stories about Iraq. It includes the fall of Saddam Husain from the author who is an Arab that understands the culture and language. He has many interviews with Iraqis and first hand accounts of what went on through many phases and the US occupation in particular. It would be good for someone who has lived under a rock and is unaware of what goes on in the Middle East, but for me… I’ve read a lot about the Middle East and this is just more of the same. Atrocities, beheading, suicide bombers, outsiders trying to fix the unfixable and I just could not keep my interest there. So much hatred in the name of God. We vs they. One sect against another. It gets soooo tiresome with no end to the misery. He tried to give a little hope in the end, but the story has been going on for centuries.

After reading this book, I am convinced that going into Iraq at this time was very unwise -- we just had NO IDEA what we were getting into...

It's been a while since I've read anything longform on the Iraq War - and very strange to think that it's been 10 years since the U.S. invaded. Anthony Shadid's book is really the only prominent English-language book that's been written to highlight the experience of Iraqis in the war, rather than American soldiers and administrators.

I wanted to love this book, both because of its premise (that Iraqis' experiences should count just as much as Americans') and because of its author, who appears to have been a fearless, empathetic correspondent who devoted his life to reporting on the Arab world and died doing so.

While the book is solid, it failed to rise to the next level for me for a few reasons. First, as other reviewers have noted, if you paid relatively close attention during the Iraq War, few of the stories contained herein will be particularly revelatory. This is partially a function of the fact that Shadid was such an excellent reporter in the first place - much of his journalism for the Washington Post during the war and occupation became a standard part of the narrative of the war: accidental killings by U.S. troops, the rise of sectarian violence, and the complete disillusionment of the Iraqi populace with the occupation.

More importantly though, is that Shadid's writing leaves much to be desired. At the grammatical level, many sentences seem stilted and often misplace or misdirect key modifiers. At the stylistic level, Shadid is too much the consummate newspaper writer, reciting, expositing, and quoting at the cost of flow. And organizationally, this book feels too much like many newspaper articles agglomerated; it could have used a more aggressive editor.

All in all, recommended, particularly if you feel ignorant of the day-to-day effects of the Iraq War on Iraq's inhabitants, but by no means perfect.

A shocking account of the American invasion of Iraq and it's immediate aftermath told from the perspective of the Iraqis. Most shocking is to contemplate the stupidity, arrogance, and hubris of the Bush administration in pursuing the invasion. Had they made even a minimal effort to understand the country and its culture, there may have been a different outcome.