The Day Iraq's Music Died

Canadian independent journalist Hadani Ditmars's first glimpse of Baghdad wasn't hunkered in a Humvee full of terrified American soldiers. She'd been there off and on since 1997, reporting for the New York Times and other papers on the effects of the Hussein regime and U.N. sanctions on the Iraqi people. What she found was a humanitarian disaster, but a still-flourishing culture of music and theater; when she went back to Baghdad just after the invasion to finish her recent book, "Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman's Journey Through Iraq," that culture was gone. The country had spiraled even further downward into "criminal anarchy and de facto theocracy," and the country's music had died.

Being of mixed French and Lebanese heritage, and speaking Arabic, Ditmars could penetrate layers of Iraqi society other Western reporters could not -- especially the private world of Iraqi women and now-persecuted artists. Though "Dancing" covers some of her hard news assignments, including a tour of Abu Ghraib, the book's greatest achievement is in taking the reader where no other reporter has dared: into the hearts of the Iraqi people themselves.

Dean Kuipers: Why has your book has been attacked by right-wing critics?

Hadani Ditmars: It's not a partisan book. It's subversive in that it's the Iraqi narrative. There's so many books out there -- endless hand-wringing about American foreign policy, and what's good for America. Well, my book is about the impact of that foreign policy on the lives of average Iraqis. But for some reason, I've been demonized by the American Enterprise Institute, which everyone says is a badge of honor.

Kuipers: Showing empathy for the Iraqis is a threat to their war.

Ditmars: The book is unique in that it offers us a sense of perspective that you can't get from most of the journalists' books out there. That's the subversive thing: to humanize the enemy. And to show that Iraq was a secular, middle-class, educated society that is now, thanks to decades of American foreign policy and despotism and sanctions, etc., come close to becoming a failed terrorist state. But it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Iraq was a police state, but not every aspect of the state was negative. It had the best health care and education system in the Arab world. Rights for women were enshrined in the constitution. It had the most liberal family law in the Arab world. Post-invasion, the women have been sold down the river. Sherry Blair and Laura Bush, who did their little feminist flag-waving to promote the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of women's rights, seem to have completely forgotten what's going on in Iraq.

Kuipers: Why did you first go to Iraq?

Ditmars: I first went to Iraq on assignment for the New York Times Magazine in 1997, to do a day in the life of an Iraqi hospital, to talk about sanctions and health care issues. So, I hung out in this hospital in Karada, in this middle-class neighborhood of Baghdad, a private hospital run by a nun. A very tough, French-speaking nun who had to negotiate with black-marketeers to buy penicillin -- who performed abortions in this Catholic hospital. Which is pretty mind-blowing, for the average American.

Kuipers: Health care was in crisis because of sanctions and the previous wars?

Ditmars: Yeah. The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years. It really bankrupted the country. And then, the first Gulf War, which killed, by some estimates, 100,000 Iraqis. So many families were left bereft of husbands. In fact, one of the women in my book, Ahlam, who is a beautician and became my friend, her husband had died on the infamous "Highway of Death," which Seymour Hersh so well documented.

So, she was raising two kids in sanctions-plagued Baghdad, and she saved up just enough money to buy her own beauty parlor right before the invasion, and when I saw her after the invasion, she had very few customers, because women were having to wear hijabs, they had no money, they were terrified of going out. So, the beauty parlor was this interesting crucible, for me, of Iraqi society. And I went there before to escape the Baathist minders that we had to pay to spy on us, basically.