Engel, Richard, War Journal, My Five Years In Iraq, Simon & Schuster, 2008
NBC News correspondent Richard Engel’s War Journal My Five Years In Iraq gives a different perspective from other books on the Iraq War. It’s not a history full of details. It’s not a soldier’s story about combat. It gives a Western journalist’s view of the conflict mixed in with the experiences of the Iraqis that he worked with. It reads like a journal and has some very interesting parts to it especially about the everyday brutality journalists and Iraqis had to live through during the civil war years.
Engel moved to the Middle East in 1996 and went to Iraq before the 2003 invasion to get a view from inside the country. He didn’t understand why the United States invaded Iraq since no one in the region thought the country was a big issue beforehand but supported the war believing that it could transform the region. That’s why he begins with the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein. It seemed like a turning point and a reason to be optimistic that things would work out. In fact, the book would be a long discussion on how the author became disillusioned and even shell shocked by all the horrors he saw.
The book shows some common Western beliefs in Iraq mixed in with some insights gained from being in the country for so long. For instance, Engel talks about the split between Sunnis and Shiites and said that the two sects had always been in conflict which became the mainstream Western explanation for why Iraq went wrong. Then he adds that there was a power struggle after 2003 with the Sunnis who’d run the country since it was formed in 1920 being replaced by the Shiites who were empowered by the Americans. That political explanation is often overlooked.
The best parts are the personal insights into what it was like being a reporter in Iraq from 2003-2008 and what his Iraqi colleagues went through.
For instance, Engles talks about how there were campaigns launched against the U.S. media by the Bush administration and conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham for being too negative about Iraq and not reporting on good news. Journalists were painted as liberals who lived in the Green Zone or hotels and never went out into the country to cover all the positive things that were happening. Engles was personally offended by these criticisms. He retorted that the press was out in the streets seeing all the violence and problems in Iraq not sitting behind blast walls or in hotel verandas. Not only that but he and his Iraqi staff believed that the reports were actually better than the reality which was much worse.
Engles and his staff were victims of the violence in the country not just filing stories about it as well. The author for instance was bombed four times, three times in his bureau and one time in a U.S. Army Humvee. In one instance, insurgents tried to destroy his entire office with two car bombs. Luckily the first one blew a large hole in the entrance way to the complex so that the follow up vehicle fell into it and wasn’t able to reach the building. One of his Iraqi staff Ali was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army and tortured. He was hung upside down and beaten with metal rods because he was accused of collaborating with the Americans. He was only released after a cleric he knew vouched for him.
As the civil war took off in 2006 the book becomes more and more gruesome. Ali’s father was kidnapped so he went to Baghdad’s morgues every day to see if his body showed up. He met an old man who took all the bodies from one morgue and buried then in the famous Najaf cemetery no matter their sect because he believed everyone deserved a proper burial. The morgues were disgusting as many didn’t have refrigeration because the power always went out. Bodies were piled up, decomposing and often covered in maggots.
There’s descriptions of some of the utter barbarity of the insurgents and militias who were fighting for control of Baghdad. Some insurgents kidnapped a little boy from a Shiite family who refused to move from their neighborhood. They killed the kid, stuffed his body with rice, baked it and left him on a platter in front of his parent’s house. Another time a body was found in the Tigris with a metal rod driven through his rib cage and tomatoes placed on each end like a kebab.
It was stories like these that made Engles a war cynic. The White House said Iraq was about fighting the war on terrorism and spreading democracy to the Middle East. To him, U.S. soldiers and Marines picking up dead bodies everyday as Sunnis and Shiites fought for control of the country had nothing to do with 9/11, Al Qaeda or international terrorism. He also didn’t think the Shiite majority or the Kurds believed in democracy. Voting was simply a way to take power and impose their will upon the country with the Sunnis being the victims. Elections just made the power struggles worse in his opinion. More importantly there was no government, services or law and order in most of the country so democracy had no real impact upon everyday Iraqis who were suffering.
War Journal is a very engaging read and gives a different perspective than many books about the Iraq War. It provides a view into some of the utter horrors and conflict the country faced from 2003-2008. Thankfully not the entire tome is about that. There are plenty of times when Engles is just talking about his daily routine, or embedding with U.S. troops, and interviewing Iraqi officials. The book does progress like the war did however getting more and more violent and expressing the total chaos Iraq fell into as more time passed.
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