One of the more surprising statistics cited by Shadid is that in post-war Iraq, jobs with Americans are actually the most plentiful source of labor, and pay the best, from $130 up to $175 a month (284).
This statistic starkly underlines how the hope of America pulling out of Iraq without causing economic as well as military chaos seems bleak. The volunteers soldiers still hold fast to the sunrise to sunset fast of Ramadan, and feel grateful that they are able to help their families during the nightly feast in a month that is so sacred -- but not because they feel the ideals of America are important to their nation's collective future. Of course, for some Iraqis, no matter what the salary, joining the occupying forces was morally wrong, and simply not worth the money, however high, that Americans might pay. The enlisted Iraqi soldiers worry about retaliation, stating grimly that opponents will "not forget" their faces (285).
This is a nation, Shadid stresses, that never forgets anything -- not a betrayal, not a religious conflict, nothing. He quotes religious, militant Islamicists, who speak of cleansing their nation of all foreign forces and find, in an atmosphere of poverty and degradation, at least some pride that their children may have died fighting for Islamic ideals, and have not fallen in with America. They use tactics that Americans would call terrorism, but what to many Iraqis is noble resistant to foreign, Western forces (290) "In a confusing aftermath...nothing was confusing" to men who believed in fundamentalist tenants of faith (291). In one bombing described by Shadid, "once again, the gulf between occupier and occupied" was filed with "unavoidable slights," even after the man had died, like leaving the man his back his family was allowed to identify him (296).
The Americans scoff that the instigator was motivated by money, although the man's family insist that it was faith. Ironically, when Iraqis volunteer for the Americans to serve in the national army, the Americans view this as idealism,...
But when a man reacts violently against the Americans; the Americans think that money must have something to do with it, while many Iraqis call the man a martyr to Islam.
However illogical some fundamentalist actions and reactions may be, however "elastic" their interpretation of the Koran to justify violence or hatred of America and Israel, it still shows how once again, Shadid suggest, America has blundered in the Middle East (303). America shows its own illogical reasoning in explaining the mindset of the people it is freeing, or occupying -- the verb used to describe the invasion depends on what side is speaking.
American incomprehension of the Middle East is a reoccurring pattern in American history. It lies partially misunderstanding of how America's close ties with Israel make it seem partisan in Arab eyes, not a neutral force as it regards itself, in its own democratic vision. It lies partially in the American ideal of secularism that is so anathema to the Middle East. Americans thought that ancient rivalries in Iraq could be swept away with new a new form of governance, with democratic ideals that America regards as universal ideals, and with superior but just military force. America thought that the terrors of the Saddam Hussein regime were enough to eradicate the hatred of America and the ideology of militant Islam. Instead, the chaos of civil war made religion and the identity afforded by nationalism even more comforting to Iraqis. Of course, it is not only in the Middle East that America has made this mistake: "Their destiny will be the same as in Vietnam," says one Iraqi (285). Hearing unfortunate American involvement in a foreign land analogized with Vietnam is nothing new for Americans, but it sounds especially chilling in the voice of an Iraqi, not just in the voice of an American critiquing the Iraqi war.
Works Cited
Shadid, Anthony. Night Draws Near. New York, Henry Holt and…
