Meredith Rose, 'Outside the Emerald City,' A Review of Rory McCarthy, If Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated'

Rory McCarthy, Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New . London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.

In a poignant scene, Rory McCarthy describes a visit he made to Osama bin Zayed primary school in Falluja. The word Falluja now carries the indictment of time and history, like Guernica or Dresden, the site and sight of appalling destruction. This visit was before the massive retaliation against Falluja for its early resistance to occupation by the Coalition of the Willing. McCarthy was taken there by an acquaintance, Mohammad Hassan al Balwa, a businessman who described himself as ‘a son of this city’.  At first he thinks the building has been abandoned; the outside walls are crumbling, rubbish is piled high in the playground, the concrete ceiling on the second floor looks dangerously buckled. But inside, hundreds of young children are sitting in their classes. Few of the rooms have light bulbs or even switches, bare wires dangle from the cracks in the plaster, but the children sit dutifully, attending to their lessons. The visitors are met by a small group from the education committee of the school and continue their tour. At the end of it, Hekmat Jabbar, head of the city’s teacher’s union, who has been there with them, but silent throughout, turns to McCarthy and says: ‘If you wonder why there are demonstrations in Falluja … then you should know it is because of this’.[1]

Within weeks, US troops launch a major assault on Falluja on 5 April 2004, pull back on April 30 after striking a deal with the insurgents (the day after the first photos emerge of abuse by American guards  in Abu Ghraib), then launch a second offensive on November 8 after weeks of air strikes. By December, the city is largely destroyed.

As US casualties in Iraq pass 3500, Cindy Sheehan resigns from the US anti-war movement, Bush uses his power of presidential veto to derail a timetable for withdrawal which the Democrats have been forced to present following a historically tidal election in late 2006, Scooter Libby awaits jail for intimidating a government official who speaks out  at the beginning of the war, and  a year has  passed since Johns Hopkins University released its revised study estimating that 650,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion in March 2003, Rory McCarthy’s book makes an important and unique contribution in the growing body of literature on this most horrendous occurrence. His book is one of several important works which have been released by senior correspondents from leading newspapers and journals in the home countries of the “Coalition of the Willing”. Whatever may have been the political starting points of this variety of professional eyewitnesses, the reports are similar: barbarity, confusion, insanity and destruction. They are powerful and important indictments by working journalists of this period. Uniquely, McCarthy’s book is an episodic account of his time as Guardian correspondent in from May 2003 until late 2005; and it concentrates upon his conversations and interactions with Iraqi people who are living through this cataclysm. His book contains less analysis and context than some of the others. But its contribution is that he allows the people to speak for themselves, reports on their daily lives, their feelings and aspirations during this extraordinary time. In a review in the Independent, Kim Sengupta said ‘The book reveals a deeply interested, concerned but also slightly bewildered traveller through a state in anarchy’.[2] In many ways it is the bewilderment which is the power of this book. It shows an ordinary person walking through a living nightmare with other ordinary people who are living it. It is a timely contribution.

McCarthy was 31 when he first went to . He had been a journalist for nearly ten years, working for a French news agency in Hong Kong and Tokyo, but had no experience in the Middle East. In 1999 he was sent to , from where he was soon dispatching stories to the Guardian about the new military regime in under Musharraf, and he travelled to the of the Taliban returning after September 11, 2001 when the regime fell. He made two visits to Baghdad for the paper prior to the invasion in 2003, but did not consider himself a ‘war correspondent’.  He was then sent to following the fall of Saddam in April 2003 to report on the ‘new’ country and remained until late 2005.[3] He did not ever live in what Rajiv Chandrasekaran called the ‘Emerald City’, the infamous and other-worldly Green Zone, but instead lived in the wider community and travelled extensively throughout [4].

Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated is the most recent in a number of important works released by senior newspaper correspondents that began with Robert Fisk’s magisterial The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East in 2005. Fisk has been based in the Middle East as the Independent’s correspondent for nearly thirty years, and the book collects his long history of war reporting across the Middle East in a single source. Part memoir, part history, part passionate polemic, Fisk’s book has been written expressly to encourage readers to ‘reject the narrative of history laid down by their presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists … we have to reshape our own view of the world unencumbered by clichés and dead words like “war on terror”, “surgical strike”, “democracy” – democracy delivered by Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters’. [5] In 2006, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, assistant managing editor for the Washington Post and the former Baghdad bureau chief, published Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, a scathing account of the inhabitants of the Green Zone during the occupation, the horrors and insanity of post war planning under the ‘imperial viceroy’ L. Paul Bremer, from a flat tax to new intellectual property laws in what he calls ‘Versailles on the Tigris’.[6]

Chandrasekaran’s work complements the powerful and lucid account by Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq. Cockburn, like Fisk, has been a Middle East correspondent for the Independent for many years. Cockburn’s book documents his frequent visits to before and during the war, but is also much broader, with valuable accounts and analysis of during the era of Saddam, the Iran-Iraq war, so vital for understanding the context of the current situation, and the sanctions of the 1990s. He also presents a scathing account of the first few weeks of the Occupation, Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the emergence of the insurgency. In the same year, Thomas Ricks, Pentagon Correspondent for the Washington Post, released his contribution Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq. Somewhat more conservative politically, Ricks’ analysis presents an account which nevertheless echoes the observations and conclusions of these other works. These accounts have been balanced by what is now a trilogy from Bob Woodward; Bush at War in 2002, Plan of Attack (Bush at War part II) in 2004 and State of Denial (Bush at War part III) in 2006. Woodward, the Washington Post journalist who received the Pulitzer Prize for his work with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal in the 1970s,  has focused on the Bush administration at home. He has had plenty to focus on.

All of these accounts of were preceded by the 2004 book by John Martinkus of ‘s SBS television, Travels in American Iraq. In the Australian context, exposés of Bush’s allies in complicity and misinformation in the lead-up to the war have included Howard’s War by Alison Broinowski, 2003; Invasion of Iraq: An Eyewitness Account by Waratah Rose Gillespie, 2004  (two of the few women to publish in this area), and Andrew Wilkie’s Axis of  Deceit, 2004. Wilkie resigned from ’s Office of National Assessment in March 2003, based on his view of the situation in , especially with regard to its Weapons Program. These books remain searing indictments of Australian entry into this misadventure, clearly illegal under international law.

This reporting has been importantly supported by the work of Dahr Jamail, recently interviewed in this journal.[7] Jamail’s sometimes daily reports from within Iraq have been vital to getting information out of a situation which in the beginning saw sanitized reporting, embedded journalists and  triumphalism from Bush (who on an aircraft carrier in May 2003 proclaimed  ‘Mission Accomplished’; and taunted the Iraqi resistance with ‘bring it on’ later that year). That was four years, 3500 deaths, tens of thousands of service personnel  wounded,  billions of dollars and  hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths ago.

McCarthy reports sensitively on people across . Barrack, a lawyer from Hilla, south of Baghdad; Ali Abid Hassan, who had crawled alive out of Saddam’s mass graves in 1991; Najwa al-Bayati, a veterinarian, a widow with three adult sons with whom he stayed for a week in Baghdad (a delicate situation to arrange); young men in Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia; Siham Hattab Hamdan, a young woman who lectured in English literature at Mustansiriya University whose great obsession is E.M. Forster and A Passage to India.

What emerges is an extraordinary nation that has suffered for years from the combined effects of the first Gulf War, Saddam’s dictatorship, and international sanctions against the regime that merely intensified the people’s suffering. The Osama bin Zayed primary school is an example.  McCarthy documents George Bush senior’s speeches urging the Iraqis to revolt and then the ’ brutal betrayal of these people. He attends the opening of a mass grave with hundreds of family members eager to discover remains of loved ones killed in the butchery of that time. He shows always, the ongoing violence and destruction of the current occupation. And in the midst of it all, ordinary people struggling to get on with their lives. He attends a meeting of the Iraqi writers’ union, held weekly in a building off Saddoun   Street and there he meets Haitham al Zubaidi, the writer whose poem provides the title of the book.  Haitham is writing a thesis on ‘the Function of the Classic Myth in Keats and Shelley’, and lectures occasionally at Baghdad University. McCarthy learns that ‘poetry in , in the Arab world, is treated with tender reverence. Poems are published daily in the Arabic newspapers … the great poets of Iraq have always been respected as national figures … to speak of Mutannabi, a tenth century poet from the southern Iraqi town of Kufa, is to conjure a figure of immense national stature … who is as well known as any great caliph or warrior’.[8]

In comparison to the chaos and suffering of the Iraqi streets, Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes the ‘bubble’ of the Green Zone. A world of villas, swimming pools, salsa dancing, Bible study classes, FM radio, air conditioning, humvees (most paid for by Halliburton), where Iraqis work as translators, janitors, gardeners at best, brought in  chain gang formation by American foremen.  He describes Bush appointees with no Arab language skills, who were sometimes vetted in interviews over their attitude to Roe v Wade, and others like Jim Steele, the security adviser for Bremer who had previously worked for Enron. was becoming, according to Chandrasekaran, ‘a terrarium for a number of neoconservative policies that they were never able to implement here in the ’.[9]

With growing casualties and ongoing injustices becoming increasingly apparent, in November 2006 Americans went to the polls in what proved to be an historic mid-term  election. In the face of trends to the right which have been developing for over two decades, and which have become something of a canonical theme in US history within the academy, Republican candidates were swept from office all over the country. When Webb took Virginia on November 9, Democrats had won both houses, an unexpected event which had not occurred for decades. Rumsfeld, the architect of the Iraq War, resigned. In New York, Democrats took office at all levels.  Referenda resolutions calling for withdrawal from included on ballot papers in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Illinois, all got up resoundingly. In Vermont, Bernie Sanders, an independent associated with the Progressive Party, who described himself as a democratic socialist, took the Senate seat conclusively. Michael Moore’s website was flooded with photographs from all over the country of ordinary Americans, black, white, young, old, men, women, standing outside  polling booths holding brooms, with the theme of  ‘sweeping the Republicans out of office’.[10]  The impetus for change was clearly being driven by opposition to the war in , although a broad range of issues, including the environment, accompanied the drive. On November 8, Tom Engelhardt wrote that in the summer of 2005 two storms hit the ‘endlessly vacationing President’ in Crawford, Texas –‘Hurricanes Cindy and Katrina. Cindy Sheehan tore away the bloodless look of no casualties in (where body counts, body bags, and the return of the dead to American shores was being hidden away from both cameras and attention). She gave a mother’s face to a son’s death and to a nation’s increasing frustration. Katrina revealed to many Americans that the Bush administration had been creating Iraq-like conditions  in the ‘homeland’ And that was more or less that. The President’s approval rating plunged under 40% and has (a few momentary blips aside) bounced around between there and the low 30s ever since. By election 2006, presidential "capital" was a concept long consigned to the dustbin of history.’[11]

There was a sense of dynamism and change at that time. On his website, Moore called for a moment of rest to savour this historic expression from Americans. While Scooter Libby is on track for imprisonment following his conviction for lying about conversations with reporters regarding Valerie Plame, and will be the highest ranking White House official to be imprisoned since the Iran Contra Affair,[12] the moment has passed and has been replaced with frustration and a growing sense of anger.  The Democrats have failed to fulfil the wishes of the American people. Growing bodies of literature and public discourse display anathema and opposition to the war in and to the failure of the Democrats to respond to the American people.[13] There is a significant rift in the American polity, rarely seen before.

In 1998, in an article in the New Left Review, Daniel Lazare discussed the situation in the US in an article called ‘America the Undemocratic’ that specifically targeted the US Constitution as being at what he described as ‘the heart of the growing crisis of US democracy.’[14]  He noted startling incarceration rates, the ‘unchecked brutality’ of  the war on drugs (now evolved into the much more brutal ‘war on terror’ — the unending war as first described by Bush), the use of the death penalty and the extent of legalized corruption in American politics.[15] He concluded that what he describes as the ‘cult of the Constitution’ had produced the ‘Bourgeois Republic in extremis’, [16]  and cited the history of  response to industrial action as evidence of its limitations. He noted that general anti-labour violence ‘exploded’ between 1872 and 1914. Seven workers were killed in labour disputes in , 16 in , 35 in . At the same time, between 500 and 800 were killed in the , with the only country exceeding this number being Czarist Russia (with 2000-5000 labour deaths during this period). ‘While no country claimed to value individual rights more highly than the , few suppressed the collective rights of labour more vigorously.’[17]  While these developments may have been superseded during the New Deal and the decade of intense labor struggle in the in the 1930s, the repression of the 1950s did much to turn this back again.

Lazare argued that no one was a greater champion of America’s ‘specialness’ than Bill Clinton who was fond of repeating ‘there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what’s right with America’, and this ‘solipsistic’ nature of the American polity is repeated historically.[18] According to Clinton, "the whole history of is in large measure the story of our attempt to give more meaning to the thing we started with — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.’ [19] Thus, all answers by definition, come from within, and always derive from where they started; these basic documents. And Lazare noted that "for all its supposed timelessness … the Constitution was the very timely product of an eighteenth century provincial society on the edge of the modern era, but not yet in it.”[20]  What was created was essentially a "slaveholder’s democracy".[21]  While the Civil War pushed things forward with the addition of the 13th amendment abolishing slavery (not a part of the Bill of Rights, which is only the first ten amendments) by the 1890s, Southern Black Americans were being brutally disenfranchised by Southern Democrats. And the struggle goes on. While noting the possibilities for change, Lazare also noted that the more revered the Constitution grows, the more society beneath it will decay.[22]

Paradoxically, of course, while this sense of  ‘specialness’ may be somewhat extreme with regard to the American polity, it is not at all unique and is an important factor in creating division and suspicion globally. Australians too are increasingly told this is the "best country in the world". (‘Have you ever been anywhere else’, a Dutch migrant reported thinking to himself when exposed to this homily repeatedly upon his arrival in .[23]) Wherever it is it needs to be challenged. False division provides the framework for convincing people of the necessity of war.

McCarthy’s book is an important contribution in this endeavour. His work gives voice and humanity to the people of , people the majority of us have much more in common with than with the likes of Rumsfeld, or Bush, or Howard, or Downer or any of the other perpetrators of this carnage. All of these books are valuable in documenting and bearing witness to the butchery and the problems, they are an important part of the struggle to make the world a better place. The war in , for all of its horrors, the horrors of the neo-conservatives in the White House and their counterparts here in , is not an aberration in American history. It is certainly not an aberration in Australian history, whose rulers have been engaged for two centuries in similar ventures, both internally and externally. But they are extreme. 650,000 dead in a handful of years. The world’s biggest anti war movement demonstrated before the war began. Huge instruments of repression were created in response (the Patriot Act in the ; the Anti-terrorism legislation in , Guantanamo Bay). Americans turned out in historic numbers to express their outrage electorally over the war in and have seen that endeavour turned back. In , huge poll leads over the incumbent Howard government have been turned back in a series of intimidating statements from clearly unaccountable bodies like the Business Council and a fear campaign about unions, to rival the fear campaign about interest rates and the appalling assault on refugees in the wake of September 11 in 2001. As more human beings die in , and more of and are plunged into Iraq-like conditions (there is a crisis for Indigenous people in which must always be acknowledged in any discussion such as this), it is time to start talking not about a change of government, but about a change of system. And that will never come from above, but always from below. As Lazare says so evocatively in his article, the US Constitution’s great gift to the cause of international democracy is contained in its first three words; the rest of it can go. We the People. The people of , whose suffering and loss has been so great, and whose voices so silenced, who have  been given space in McCarthy’s book, deserve nothing less.

Meredith Rose is a doctoral candidate in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, in the field of Race and International relations in history. She has been active in the Australian anti-war movement from 2002 until 2007.