Into the Iraqi Mind

In May of last year, as Iraqis began adjusting to the chaotic status quo of gunfire, occasional suicide attacks, and failed electricity that followed the American arrival in their country, The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Foreman sent back a letter from Baghdad cheerily titled, "You Have No Idea How Well Things Are Going."

Foreman described smiling little girls and "women old and young" flirting "outrageously with GIs." Iraqis in his account could not stop what he called "love bombing" the Americans with such cheers as "Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson," good-naturedly directed at some African American soldiers. The American presence, Foreman reassured his readers, inspired "no fury" among Iraqis. Around the same time, Nir Rosen, writing for The Progressive, and presumably from the same Iraq that Foreman was in, painted a far bleaker picture of Baghdad, one in which five-year-olds played amid unexploded cluster bombs and AK-47s and grenade launchers were sold in open-air markets. "Already, there is nostalgia for the old regime," he observed. "At least there was a regime, people say."

What do Iraqis feel and think about the American occupation? Many liberal and conservative writers have had no problem answering that question in the months since the end of combat operations, though with starkly different conclusions. In one version of Iraq, the people are grateful and liberated, their salaries and home appliances having increased under occupation, along with their freedoms. In the other, the Iraqis seethe at the occupation of their nation and want the imperialist Americans out, dead or alive.

That opinion journals might paint the situation in black and white is perhaps understandable. The American discussion about Iraq is, after all, more than just about Iraq and Iraqis. It is about ideas, about competing prescriptions for what America’s role in the world should be, and ideologically driven writers tend to choose evidence that fits their point of view. But reporters cannot merely build a case. Their job is to search through the gray zones, to try to grasp the ambiguities. And nowhere has this become more crucial than in Iraq. At this point, the success or failure of America’s occupation depends almost entirely on how Iraqis respond to the United States and its efforts at nation-building. Reporters must find a way to learn what Iraqis really think.

And yet, experienced reporters say that figuring out Iraqi sentiment has become one of the most complex journalistic endeavors in years. Iraq, of course, presents the standard obstacles for foreign correspondents -- uneven translators, brutal deadlines, the difficulty of finding sources in an unfamiliar environment. But it also poses a series of problems particular to working in Iraq. For one thing, journalists fear they could easily become targets for Iraqi insurgents, and this has kept them from venturing out into the marketplaces and street corners where ordinary Iraqis are found. When reporters do speak to Iraqis, the skewed power dynamic of the occupation enters into every interview and interaction. In the eyes of many Iraqis, a foreign journalist, and especially an American one, is just an extension of the conquering army. To complicate matters further, there are almost no nongovernmental organizations or aid groups, or even the United Nations, to provide any kind of independent analysis or to point reporters in the direction of stories. And, finally, there is the psychology of Iraqis themselves. After living under tyranny for more than thirty years, are they reliable sources of information?

The four journalists below, all of whom have spent considerable time in Iraq during the past half year, say those obstacles are real and are specific to postwar Iraq. But in spite of such barriers, they say they have found ways to plumb the grayness of the Iraqi experience, to try to tell a nuanced story that feels close to the sometimes contradictory and cluttered truth.