Adam Kirsch reviews Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near in Moral Luck & the Iraq War:
More, they became suspicious. ‘Is it believable,’ one man asks Mr. Shadid, ‘that America, the greatest nation on earth, can’t bring order to a small spot on the map?’ It was easier to believe that American mistakes were part of a master plan. The most disheartening fact in ‘Night Draws Near’ is the deeply rooted paranoia and passivity of the Iraqis, which quickly destroys the sanguine American belief that an Iraq without Saddam could simply govern itself. Stemming from a traditionally tribal, authoritarian culture, and just emerging from decades of Stalinoid to talitarianism, the Iraqis that Mr. Shadid writes about are given to the most sinister kinds of political fantasy. At one Sunni mosque, he is handed a flier that declares: ‘The goal of the infidels, after stealing our wealth, is to remove us from our religion by force and all other means, so that we become a lost nation without principle, making it easier for the Jews and Christians to humiliate us.’The flip side of this paranoia, of course, is an exaggerated sense of helplessness, an expectation that every good — from electricity and clean water to democracy and prosperity — can only come as a gift of the ruler. Hume Horan, a State Department Arabist, complains that ‘They’re hoping for a deus ex machina, which is Uncle Sam.’ Or as one Iraqi tells Mr. Packer: ‘We don’t hate them because they are Americans. It is because they are the superpower, but where is the super power? Show it to us.’