What Kind of Freedom?

President Bush, fresh off an inaugural address that committed the United States anew to the cause of global freedom, will find his soaring rhetoric put to its latest test in Iraq's national vote this Sunday. And it's a tough test. With the country in flames and insurgent attacks seemingly rising to an election-timed crescendo, Iraq makes a distinctly uninspiring showcase for the neoconservative foreign policy project.

Just ask Christian Parenti. The author and journalist made three trips to Iraq to see for himself how the newly "liberated" country was faring. As the rare correspondent who has "embedded" on both sides of this war – with the U.S. military and the Iraqi resistance – Parenti brought an immediacy and vividness to his reporting for The Nation, and now in his new book, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq.

As Akeel, a resident of Baghdad and Parenti's 26-year-old translator, remarked when asked of life in the newly freed Iraq: "Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don't know what to do with all this freedom."

Parenti recently came by the MotherJones.com office to discuss his reporting from Iraq.

What made you want to go to Iraq?

Christian Parenti: Well, I wanted to see the situation and I also wanted to have the right to speak about the war. I noticed, perhaps at the level of subtext, that some writers were definitely implying that if you were not there you didn't have the right to comment. I also knew the war in Iraq was not going to be quick and clean. This war is simply the biggest story of our generation. After my initial trip, I wanted to go back and better understand the situation there. Immediately people suggested that I write a book, which required return trips, so I went back two more times for roughly a total of four months. So that's why – to weigh in on the largest story of our time.

You got access to both sides of the conflict. How difficult was that to do?

Well, getting access to the U.S. military is not so hard. They have a structure for embedding journalists; it's just a matter of wading through their bureaucracy. One time I was with the Florida National Guard and on a return trip I ended up in Fallujah. The official setting up the embed said, "There's a long line with everyone here in Baghdad, but if you want to go out to the Wild West there's nobody really out there." So I said, "O.K., I'll go there," and they sent me to Fallujah with the 82nd Airborne.

Meeting the resistance was much more complicated: it involved gaining the trust of Iraqis who in turn were equally trusted by the resistance. Organizing the first meetings took a long time – many visits with former soldiers who claimed not to be in the resistance but who wanted to have long conversations, wanted to look at my books, and wanted me to come back the next day to check me out some more. Now, I would be extremely wary if I went back. I definitely would not meet with the resistance now because the kidnapping, especially in central Iraq, is completely uncontrollable.

How, structurally, would you characterize the insurgency?

I see it as a horizontal network made up of cells, with individual groups and clusters of cells. Within this network there are nodes, which have different levels of organization. The nodes with greater organization pulsate out more resources, ideology, direction, and a program to the rest of the network. Some of these nodes are Jihadist, and some are remnants from the old police state, and these factions may or may not relate to one another. The former police forces have relationships with informants as well as with self-organized cells. They can mobilize them and pull them into actions and create networks of alliances for actions and then disband. They are basically horizontal networks of autonomous groups.