Michael Massing, on Iraq

Michael Massing of Columbia Journalism Review has two excellent pieces in the current and upcoming issues of the New York Review of Books; and luckily for us they both available in fulltext, online.
The first is this one, which is a review of two fascinating– though admittedly not new– books that look at the original US invasion of Iraq from the “grunt” Marine’s point of view. One of these books is by Nathaniel Fick, who was a lieutenant in the Marines in first, Afghanistan, and then the original invasion of Iraq. The other is by Evan Wright, who was a writer for Rolling Stone who was embedded with the military in Kuwait, as the count-down to the invasion continued. Then, after meeting Fick, Wright decided to abandon the cushy officers’ digs where most of the embeds hung out and go along on the invasion itself with Fick and his 23 grunts, instead.
Massing’s description of these two books definitely makes me want to read them… The war they describe is one that already, even as the invasion column was snaking its way up towards Baghdad, was committing some extremely inhumane (an defiling) acts. Massing is quite right to note that soon afterwards, the collective memory of many Americans tended to forget that. The collapse of the Saddam regime happened relatively quickly and decisively; and afterwards, Americans’ attention very rapidly shifted to the very evident shortcomings in the US forces’ planning for the post-combat phase, so no-one spent much time recalling what had happened during the invasion itself.
Massing is also quite right to contrast the gritty, inhumane view of the invasion phase that emerges from both these books with the uber-sanitized rendering of exactly the same events that emerged from the more august pens of the “big-time” MSM reporters like the NYT’s Michael Gordon.
Massing also provides some excerpts from this 2005 interview with Evan Wright by Angelo Matera, in which Wright said,

we’ve been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw’s book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They’ve forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it’s important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn’t serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they’re grown up, and as they’ve gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they’ve started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.
I never read Tom Brokaw’s book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut—who wrote Slaughterhouse Five—and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there’s no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.

This interested me, because I made something like the very same argument about the rose-colored view of WW2 in an article I had in the December issue of Friends Journal… (I’m going to write a separate post about that article, very shortly.)
Anyway, the second Massing NYRB article of note is this one, that’s in the upcoming (January 17, 2008) issue of the mag. It is a very well-written appreciation of the “Inside Iraq” blog, which as alert JWN readers may be aware is one of my favorites.
When writing his article, Massing phoned one of the blog;’s contributors, Sahar, at the McClatchy Newspapers office in Baghdad, and he recounts a few things she told him:

“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?”
She continued: “How many have been killed in Iraq? Bordering on a million. If you realize that these are real people with real feelings who are being killed—that they are fathers and husbands, teachers and doctors—if these facts could be made known, would people be so brutalized? It’s our job as Iraqi journalists to show that Iraqis are real people. This is what we try to advance through the blog.”
In October, Sahar, along with five other Iraqi women who have worked for Knight Ridder/McClatchy, traveled to New York and Los Angeles to receive the annual Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Today, she is the only one of the six who remains with the bureau. The rest have all fled Iraq—because of death threats, because of the violence raging in their neighborhoods, because of (in one case) the murder of a husband, daughter, and mother-in-law by other Iraqis. In thus leaving, these women joined the huge exodus out of Iraq, a stampede that has deprived the country of many of its most competent citizens. Sahar, who herself has lost a son to the violence, is determined to stay. “This is my home,” she told me. “This is where I want to be.”

Anyway, it’s great that Massing is able to shine his own, very strong spotlight on the excellent work of the Inside Iraq bloggers. As, too, that he brought those two intriguing books to my notice…