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Riding the authorial roller-coaster
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“How’s the book doing?” All authors gnaw at this question before answering, no matter if our book sold 100,000 copies (but the last one sold a million), if 2,730 lovingly produced volumes of our self-published work still lie wrapped in brown paper in the garage, or if the book, in everyone but the author’s eyes, is doing perfectly fine.
Not many writers can give the straight answer that the questioner usually expects (“Oh, it sold 10,802 copies in the first 14 months,” for instance), for the simple reason that nobody seems to know this figure. Only by accident, for instance, did I or (apparently) the publisher learn that the 4th updated edition of my co-authored Turkey Unveiled actually sold out in a couple of months after publication in December 2011. A reprint was quickly ordered up. Yet, now that Dining with al-Qaeda is two years old, I would like to know how many copies have been sold. Where to start, though?
Who wants to believe the amazon.com weekly sales tracker at “author central”, informing you occasionally that you sold no copies of any book whatsoever in the past week? (However you do, of course, allow yourself a pat on the back when it says that last week a dozen of copies of one of them suddenly sold in one town – this week’s thank yous to Houston TX, Boston MA and Washington DC!).
The perplexing vagueness continues with publishers’ weird accounting. After Dining with al-Qaeda came out in March 2010, I was astonished by the several thousand copies reported sold in the first half-year statement from Thomas Dunne/St Martins Press. Tearing open the full year’s statement with premature glee, I then discovered that the number had fallen by more than one third. Bookshops had apparently sent back what they couldn’t sell, leaving a good total in readers’ hands, but still, well, less than before. From previous books I know that actual royalties roll in much later, taking years to pay off any advance. Even then the math never seems to add up – and, as an agent once told me, publishers make money long before authors pay off their advances.
So, I admit it, I’m not one of those lucky few authors who actually make a cash profit from writing books. That gives me a weakness for what my old Crisis Group boss Gareth Evans disparaged as time-wasting “psychic income”.
My first installment of this virtual revenue came from launch tour events in New York and Washington DC and elsewhere, that happy period when for a historical moment Dining with al-Qaeda was #1 in amazon.com’s ‘Middle East books’. More gratification came from reviews in the media. And even if they didn’t write about it, many former reporting colleagues seem to have actually read the book and enjoyed it.
Secondly, I’m proud to say that readers on amazon.com give it an average 4-1/2 stars in the US and 5 stars in the UK. Please indulge me by sharing some of their views:
“A superb book” (Arabourne); “the author’s transparency of thought [shows an] ability to get into the Arab mind, in all its complexity” (David Schlosberg); “a valuable journey … first-rate understanding of the interplay of history, politics and culture” (BlueRidgeVa); “As an American woman who has lived for 15+ years in the region, I consider this book to be a must-read for Westerns who have never traveled to the ME” (L. Campbell); “I was caught up in the moment” (S. McGee); “The smells, dust, noise of the Turkish, Arab or Iranian streets burst from the book’s pages” (F. Brauer). Some see flaws, too, and if you insist on reading those, all can be found here.
I’m offered even better psychic income from invitations to discuss Dining with al-Qaeda with readers. The book never had academic pretensions, but one of my hopes while writing it was that new students of the Middle East would find it a fast track to understanding the context of their dry historical studies. So I was delighted to learn that Bucknell University in Pennsylvania made the book required reading for students of the International Relations of the Middle East. I then had great fun talking to the class via Skype under the watchful eye of their guide, award-winning academic Juliette Tolay, answering questions about what it felt like to see, hear and taste the Middle East – and why nothing changes as quickly as Westerners often hope.
I enjoy the steady demand for more traditional talks on the themes of Dining with al-Qaeda. Book clubs sometimes ask me along (my favorite audience), for instance a heady dinner in Brussels with several of the finest minds of the new European External Action Service. Most recently I spoke to four score grandees at the monthly Writers’ Lunch of the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London.
This occasional blog, of course, is another way for me to keep enjoying the book. At this two-year mark, about 26,000 people have visited.
Intriguingly, amazon.com’s tracker shows that book shipments plummeted for several weeks after January 2011, as stories of the Egyptian revolution predominated and the killing of Osama bin Laden in May made Americans think that the al-Qaeda chapter of their recent history had closed. Nevertheless, this year the book is coming out in French, probably as Rendez-vous avec al-Qaeda (Presses de l’Universite Laval, Quebec), translated by Benoit Léger. I’ve posted a translated excerpt about Syria (in French here, the original English here).
So French readers will soon also, I hope, discover the broader perspective that 30 years of traveling and reporting gives to, for example, the past year of Arab revolts and uprisings. Is it really an Arab spring, or merely the latest twist of familiar pieces in the Middle Eastern kaleidoscope? Allez-y! Découvrez par vous-même!
“I don’t read Hugh Pope” – Robert Fisk
Sometimes something can worry you for years, and you don’t quite know what to do about it. Robert Fisk’s writing is one of those things for me. His stories are compellingly fluent, fabulously channel Middle Eastern victimhood, and satisfyingly cast grit in the eye of Western governments’ hypocrisy. And yet against this I always have to set my experience that, in one case that is personally important to me, the swirl of rumours about Fisk’s cavalier treatment of facts seems to be true.
Iraqi Kurdish refugees fleeing into Turkey, 1991 Photo: Hugh Pope
My particular assertion about Robert Fisk’s journalism comes in a chapter of Dining with al-Qaeda devoted to the question of accuracy in Middle Eastern reporting (pages 20-27). It relates to an episode during the 1991 Iraqi Kurd refugee crisis on the mountains of the Turkish-Iraqi border. A piece by Fisk said that Turkish troops were on a “rampage of looting” stealing Iraqi Kurd refugees’ “blankets, sheets and food”. This, according to him, had led to a near-armed clash between Turkish and British troops. Fisk’s report gravely set back Turkish-allied cooperation in the relief effort. Fisk was expelled and I was ordered out too, since I worked for the same newspaper, Britain’s Independent. I was later reprieved, partly because I had nothing to do with the story. I had been back in Istanbul, writing up my own experiences of the refugee camps.
While putting together Dining with al-Qaeda, I telephoned Fisk’s main named source in those mountains, a British military doctor. To make sure, I also contacted a senior British diplomat in charge in those days, now in retirement. Both flatly denied there was anything near a clash and thought the charges of theft and tensions were sensationalized. Moreover, I noted inconsistencies between Fisk’s accounts in the newspaper and in his memoir (The Great War for Civilization, 2005). For instance, in a major narrative section of his book that is absent from the original article, Fisk meticulously describes a flight to the refugee camp in the crew bay of an Apache helicopter. The trouble is, Apaches have no crew bay.
I had shrunk from confronting Fisk in person with my findings. Most journalists hate publicly accusing each other of making things up – after all, one might oneself be found to have made a slip in a race to a deadline. A major British journalist told me he’d liked Dining with al-Qaeda, but couldn’t review it because it meant making a choice between Fisk (seven times named Britain’s ‘International Reporter of the Year’ ) and me (last known award: my school’s poetry prize). The Guardian’s Ian Black put it coyly in his review that “Pope bravely tackles the reputation of his onetime Independent colleague Robert Fisk … he is not the first journalist to wonder with envy and irritation how Fisk ‘managed to get an amazing sounding story from a dull day …’”. As leading Egyptian blogger Issandr El Amrani said in a review: “Fisk’s over-active imagination makes it easy for Pope to find holes in his reporting … If you hang around journalists with several decades of Middle East experience, particularly ones who were in Beirut in the 1980s, you keep hearing these stories again and again about Fisk. It’s a great, great shame that this otherwise powerful writer keeps on doing that.”
So it was that, when watching Fisk interviewed at length on Turkish NTV on 17 November 2011 (here), I averted my eyes towards the end when I heard journalist Barçin Yınanç pose a question that focused on my name. She said that “even though [Hugh Pope] praises your journalism”, I had written in a book that his report on that long-ago incident was exaggerated and “not based on data”.
After a dramatic pause in which presenter Oğuz Haksever apologized about not wanting a polemic, ear pieces were fiddled with and translations made, Fisk said the following:
Look, I don’t read Hugh Pope. Sorry. In the incident in question, I was in an aircraft, helicopter, full of CIA men, who had to go and intervene to prevent British and Turkish troops fighting each other. They were either side of a small stream with their rifles pointed at each other in front of my eyes. This wasn’t data. I was an eyewitness. The Americans had to go into the stream and stop them shooting at each other, because the British were trying to stop this small group of Turkish soldiers taking blankets and food from refugees … Hugh Pope’s got it wrong, as with other things during the past. I don’t have any feelings about Hugh Pope. I was an eyewitness to what happened. Sorry. I was there. He was not.
Oğuz Haksever swiftly moved the program on. The interview, mainly about the 936-page Turkish version of Fisk’s memoir, certainly had its moments. Fisk (correctly) predicted that “Bashar is going to last a lot longer in Syria than you seem to think he is … the Baath Party has a huge historical grip on Syria”; he warned Ankara to resist pressure from the U.S. and “La Clinton” to intervene against Damascus; said the words “Armenian Genocide” so often that the flustered Turkish translator gave up adding the word “alleged”; talked of the need for reporters to “be on the side of those who suffer” and “to monitor the centers of power, especially when they go to war, especially when they lie to do it”; confided that when reporting about the Kurds he wrote “with a very strong sense of cynicism … I mean irony, we need to have a certain black humour about this”; and finally dismissed Tony Blair as “the most meretricious, repulsive politician that we have in Britain, the most terrible prime minister we’ve ever had in British history”, who “seems to have a special relationship with God”, who “is a weird product of absolute self-conviction”, and who had written “an extremely self-congratulatory book.”
I was however only half-listening to the rest of the interview. Fisk had vowed three times that he had been “there”, an “eyewitness” to that 1991 incident, as he tells the story in his memoir. But he hadn’t explained why his original story (“Troops steal food and blankets from refugees”, Independent, Tuesday 30 April 1991) firmly sets the reported confrontation over the stream on Sunday night the 28th of April, while stating that he had arrived “yesterday”, which in the Independent‘s style means Monday the 29th, that is, one day after whatever happened was over. Furthermore, Fisk’s original story cites soldiers talking of past incidents, but makes no claim of seeing anything of a confrontation himself.
Whatever the British-Turkish tensions in the camp, Fisk has not convinced me that people are wrong to say that he over-played the situation. A question about his factual veracity about the incident has at last been put to him in public. I feel a sense of inner peace. The frustration that has nagged at me for 20 years has gone away.
A POSTSCRIPT (March 2012)
Britain’s satirical weekly Private Eye No. 1310 in March 2012 had the following take on the matter (apparently in part citing the above blog, so apologies for any repetition):
FISK ANALYSIS
MEMBERS of the Vulture Club, a closed Facebook group for foreign correspondents and aid workers, are circling the carcass of Robert Fisk, the Independent’s man in the Middle East, for his holier-than-thou rant against fellow war reporters following the Syrian Army’s murder of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik.
Condemning the “colonialist” assumption that “the lives of western reporters are somehow more precious, more deserving, more inherently valuable than those of the ‘foreign’ civilians who suffer around them”, Fisk accused Colvin’s editors and editors like them of pro-western double standards. “The newsrooms of London and Washington didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm to get their folk into Gaza as they did to get them into Homs,” he concluded. “Just a thought.”
Glory-hunters and hypocrites
As a matter of fact, western reporters did get round the Israeli army’s restrictions on journalists during its war with Hamas. Led by Bruno Stevens, a brave Belgian photographer, 30 found a way in over the Egyptian border. Fisk’s innuendo that foreign hacks were glory-hunters for exposing the deaths of Syrians, and hypocrites for ignoring the deaths of Palestinians, has put the war correspondents on the war path.
On the Vulture Club’s web page, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, foreign correspondent for America’s National Public Radio, describes Fisk’s article as “unconscionable”. Catherine Philp, US correspondent for the Times, says Fisk “makes it up”. Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor tells of Fisk writing a piece attacking the Baghdad press corps for being “hotel journalists” who dared not go onto the streets, while rarely leaving the safety of the hotel pool himself.
It is not only on closed Facebook groups that Fisk is being pummelled.
Hugh Pope, a former Independent colleague of Fisk’s, recently published a memoir of his three decades of reporting in the Middle East, Dining with al Qaeda. When they were both covering the Iraqi Kurd refugee crisis in 1991, he writes, Fisk reported that Turkish troops were on a “rampage of looting”, stealing refugees’ “blankets, sheets and food”, and that British forces “cocked their weapons in a confrontation with the Turkish troops”.
For his book, Pope telephoned Fisk’s main named source, a British military doctor. He also spoke to a senior British diplomat who had run the relief operation in Turkey in 1991. “Both flatly denied there was anything near a clash and thought the charges of theft and tensions were sensationalised.” In a later account of the “clash”, Pope writes, Fisk “meticulously describes a flight to the refugee camp in the crew bay of an Apache helicopter. The trouble is, Apaches have no crew bay.”
When Pope’s book came out Ian Black, diplomatic editor of the Guardian, drily noted that he was “not the first journalist to wonder with envy and irritation how Fisk ‘managed to get an amazing sounding story from a dull day’”. Meanwhile the leading Egyptian blogger Issandr El Amrani noted that “if you hang around journalists with several decades of Middle East experience, particularly ones who were in Beirut in the 1980s, you keep hearing these stories again and again about Fisk”.
Indeed you do. “It has been common knowledge for years among British and American reporters that Bob can just make things up or lift others’ work without attribution and embellish it,” writes Jamie Dettmer, another former Middle East correspondent, in his review of Pope’s book. “I recall him doing it to me on a story in Kuwait about the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Kuwaitis following the liberation of the emirate. I remember also the time Fisk filed a datelined Cairo story about a riot there when he was in fact at the time in Cyprus.”
The full text of U.S./British writer Jamie Dettmer’s 1 April 2010 blog posting (here) goes like this
BOB FISK OUTED
Hugh Pope’s memoir on his reporting in the Middle East, Dining with al-Qaeda, is, as they say, a must-read. The former Wall Street Journal and UPI correspondent — he is now at the International Crisis Group — was rated highly by his peers. His pragmatic thinking and rejection of neat ideological ways of looking at things in the region enriched his journalism, which was trustworthy and informative, even for those like me who had stints covering the region.
But not all his former peers in the Middle East UK press corp will be delighted to read what Pope has to say about journalistic ethics — mainly Bob Fisk, the London Independent‘s longtime Middle East correspondent. Robert was notorious as a reporter who sailed way over the other side of the wind when it came to facts, attributions and even datelines…
Why does Fish get away with it? It has been common knowledge for years among British and American reporters that Bob can just make things up or lift other’s work without attribution and embellish it. I recall him doing it to me on a story in Kuwait about the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Kuwaitis following the liberation of the emirate. I remember also the time Fisk filed a datelined Cairo story about a riot there when he was in fact at the time in Cyprus.
Pope’s theory on this — why Bob gets away with it — is that fellow members of the press corp don’t like to dish the dirt on their colleagues. “The one time I decided to let it be known that a fellow reporter was cheating and passing off others’ work as his own, it was I who became the odd man out, an informer with a chip on my shoulder, and standing joke,” he writes. He notes also that “editors are reluctant to challenge established writers.”
In the case of Fisk, I think, there was also a genuine sadness that Bob did this, an embarrassment and one undeserving of a journalist who had done some great and brave reporting in the 1980s in Northern Ireland and in his early and dangerous years in Beirut.
Damian Thompson
Robert Fisk’s response to all this can be seen in a 29 March 2012 posting by Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph Blogs at the London Daily Telegraph. Thompson says (here):
[Many comments by foreign correspondents upset by Fisk’s suggestion that news rooms were ignoring Gaza in favour of Homs] expand on a remark made in the Guardian by Ian Black, the paper’s diplomatic editor, who was reviewing the memoirs of Hugh Pope, a distinguished Middle East correspondent, which strongly criticise Fisk’s style of reporting … Black was choosing his words carefully (as am I) but read between the lines.
So I rang Fisk to ask what he made of all these claims … He said: “I do not make stories up, full stop. This is being put together in order to harass me and possibly The Independent.” …
What about Ian Black’s innuendo? “I’m very surprised that he wrote that. I’m amazed to see that he wrote that review [of Hugh Pope’s book]”.
But it isn’t just Black: it’s foreign correspondents from various publications who have encountered Fisk over the years. How could he explain their criticisms? “Colleagues will malign you if you’re a moderately successful journalist,” said Fisk.
Other comments on Robert Fisk’s reporting and its impact have been made by Reggie’s Blog here, Australian journalist Paul McGeough here, and, back in 2007, by veteran Middle East correspondent (and former Independent reporter) Adel Darwish here. Private Eye revisited the story in February 2013 (Eye 1333 here):
Another postscript: In Fabricator and Fraudster, published in The Critic in December 2020, British-Lebanese freelance conflict journalist and film-maker Oz Katerji gives an account of his own and others’ experiences of the late Robert Fisk’s work. His conclusion: “The veneration of Fisk, in his obituaries and throughout his career, serve as an indictment of a British foreign press that continued to indulge a man who they knew was violating not just ethical boundaries, but also moral ones.” Syrian journalist Asser Khatab wrote of his disappointment too in his 30 Oct 2021 obituary Robert Fisk, the Man Who Died Twice: “Fisk spoke of places we did not visit, and facts we did not witness, and his interview with officials, including those in the governorate, was full of long, eloquent and expressive phrases that I have no idea where they had come from.”
Take my money or die
Informed by his State Department employers that he could either serve in a Middle East war zone or watch his career wilt, Peter Van Buren chose active service helping to rebuild Iraq. His year embedded in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the notorious Sunni triangle resulted in We Meant Well: how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a delightful, 269-page book that I devoured in 24 hours flat. By turns tough, tender and eye-wateringly funny, it rises far above its principal ingredients of garbage, boredom, heat, camaraderie, hypocrisy and the constant spectacle of wanton waste.
The mind boggles at the $63 billion US effort Van Buren describes as he and other Americans of good will and otherwise “helped paste together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck”. Arabic translations of American classics are dumped behind schools, bureaucratic programs live and die in fashion cycles of a few months, and short-term photo-opportunities usually beat the occasional focus on long-term problems. And in 2009-2010, Van Buren happened to be there with the cool and independence of mind to note the nonsense down, even as his desert outposts were mortared by insurgents who scorned the “so-called Awakening, a program through which we paid money to Sunni insurgents to stop killing us.”
Van Buren doffs his hat first to the Vietnam-era Dispatches by Michael Herr and to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 from the Second World War. There is not the same epic depth to We Meant Well, but van Buren gets close. Chapter after chapter details narcissistic, ill-adapted and commercially impossible American schemes: stillborn facilities supposed to commercialize milk marketing in a country that lacked refrigeration, projects that wish bees on unwilling Iraqi widows and a Potemkin chicken-processing factory that only worked when putting on a show for visitors.
One triumph of absurdity is Van Buren’s team’s efforts to improve something as basic as water supplies and sewage treatment, until, as usual, the project stumbles over a vital but unbudgeted extra item. After all, how would Japanese and Belgian planners and funders know that an Iraqi sewage plant needs machine-gun nests to stop people stealing everything as soon as it is installed? He continues:
“The old saying ‘Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going’ seemed to apply. Our efforts, well-meaning but almost always somewhat ignorant, lacked a broader strategy, a way to connect local work with national goals. Some days it felt like the plan was to turn dozens of entities loose with millions of dollars and hope something fell together (monkeys typing might produce Shakespeare) … You don’t know what you don’t measure, leaving much of our work to have all the impact of a cheap direct-to-DVD martial arts movie.”
Along the way, dissidents like Van Buren were quickly apprised by their peers and superiors of an unspoken rule that they should believe that “you can’t really tell, but we’re winning”. Failing that, they should “stop making a fuss. No one cares about the money, we have lots of money, and not spending it angers people. We all know we are not going to really change much in Iraq, so just do your year in the desert.”
Much of the US effort was hobbled by America’s wish to believe its own preconceptions, formed by high-minded ideology and a willful disinterest in what mattered on the ground. Van Buren finds that Americans running the war effort aimed to “hide the US role and make it seem like all the projects were local efforts, something we made ourselves believe while no one else did”, had the illusion that “Iraqis want to be like us”, and were unwilling to face the possibility that “some people became insurgents not because they lacked fast-food jobs and iPads but because they hated the presence of a foreign invader in their country.”
I found this fascinatingly similar to the problems of US journalistic coverage of the Middle East, which in my book Dining with al-Qaeda I try to show can often be an artificial and misleading hybrid between reality and what Americans want to believe. Van Buren watches a visiting reporter fail to see that the U.S.-funded project he has come to inspect is fake, noting dryly that “it turns out most journalists are not as inquisitive as TV and movies would have you believe. Most are interested only in a story, not the story.” The soldiers, of course, are always dutifully upbeat about their duties when speaking to reporters on hand to witness hand-outs to Iraqis. Afterwards, Van Buren reports, the soldiers reveal their real feelings in between spitting chewed Skoal into empty Gatorade bottles: “fuck these people, we give ‘em all this shit and they just fucking try to blow us up.”
The Iraqis had their reasons to be upset. The 2003 US invasion made several aspects of everyday life worse for Iraqis than when Saddam was in charge – at the same time as the US had taken over many of Saddam’s palaces, secret police outposts and jails. Power supplies remain completely inadequate, although the U.S. found solipsistic ways to pretend they had improved; few kids attend rural schools, and even then only for half the previous amount of time, because in the new Islamic Iraq “boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime”. A veterinary doctor points out that “under Saddam we at least got medicines once in a while. Now we are free, but we don’t have medicine.” Or clean water. All this, eight years after the American-ordained era began.
Most interestingly of all, the book gives a deeply satisfying account of what it is like to live on Forward Operating Bases in the Iraqi desert. Unsentimental passages describe the life and language of soldiers (for instance, when frozen shrimpette served in the canteen makes it appropriate to say “we suck less tonight”); how an occasional random project to help Iraqis actually worked (an aging American lady who helped Iraqis with their cows, and the founding of a boy scout troop); the understated companionship of soldiers when one of their number commits suicide; and how the American bases’ sharia-like bans on sex and alcohol were often violated (a graffiti message in the Sri Lankan-cleaned latrines advertises ‘eight-inch cut dude needs rough sex tonight behind gym’.)
Peter Van Buren
Van Buren takes a quietly naïve approach, making his points about the real Iraq through acutely observed detail with a minimum of ideological finger-wagging. But in the acknowledgements, he does drop his guard, a moment of bitterness from a Japanese- and Chinese-speaking foreign service officer who feels profoundly let down by the policy choices of the George W. Bush presidency. In a comment that is, as usual, applicable to matters well beyond those of his professional purview, Van Buren gives in his acknowledgments “not thanks really, but a special notice to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who led an organization I once cared deeply for into a swamp and abandoned it there.”
Top US leaders never discussed if Iraq war was a good idea
Fine 30 Sept 2011 New York Times review (here) of what looks like an important book on how President George W. Bush never discussed whether the Iraq war was a good idea, or, indeed, how nobody knows the answer to the question of what the reason for the war was at all!
Some excerpts from Thomas Power’s take on INTELLIGENCE AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform, by Paul R. Pillar.
… [The CIA’s] hastily written October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate identifying Iraqi W.M.D. programs with “high confidence.” … was wrong in every finding … nothing … was found on the ground in Iraq… evidence may have been thin and sparse, but that there was evidence … What decided the matter … was the politicization of the whole effort… everybody at the agency, from lowliest analyst up to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, knowing their careers were on the line, called the coin toss on evidence as desired…
[Quote from ex-CIA analyst Pillars book] “The pro-war wind that the Bush administration policy makers had generated . . . was strong, unrelenting and inescapable”.
[Yet] the administration never formally debated “whether the war was a good idea.” The implication is clear: a small group of officials made the decision on their own, without leaving any record. “It was never on any meeting’s agenda,” Pillar notes…
In Dining with al-Qaeda I write of feeling exactly the same wind that blew the US into Iraq, and it is some consolation to know that I was not alone in lamenting my impotence to stand up to it. I am still looking forward to reading the book that explains the real reason why all those people had to die.
Tea with the Taliban
When I was wondering what to call my new book on the broader Middle East, I went to Homer’s bookshop in Istanbul to check out the many shelves full of competition. I soon decided I didn’t want my title to be heavy with dry theorification about Islam, democracy, politics, or terrorism. It also seemed a bit soft to join the romantic set, beckoning readers with images of Persian nights, caravans, deserts, marshes and mountains. But I didn’t want to go to the other extreme with gory high drama. In just recent years, the sanguinary sub-class alone has included dozens of titles like Holy Blood; the Blood of Lambs; the Blood of the Moon; Blood, Sweat and Steel; Blood and Oil in the Orient; and my favorite, The Land of Blood and Honey.
Middle East book titles have to struggle for attention: about 300 come out every year in the U.S. alone. I wanted something that conjured up multiple dimensions, like Stephen Glain’s Dreaming of Damascus (actually about the economics of the front-line Arab states), or Jonathan Randal’s After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? (about the Kurds). When I gave up on my first title idea — Mr. Q., I Love You — and settled on Dining with al-Qaeda, I was pleased that I’d featured the Q-word, but in an unexpected way that might draw in a reader seeking the back story. What better way to symbolize the human side of things than breaking bread together? Little did I realize that there’s nothing new under the sun, and that there were already volumes called Dining with Terrorists, The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Tea with Hezbollah. They have now been joined by Tea with the Taliban: war reporting for beginners.
Actually it’s Thee met de Taliban, since it’s written in Dutch (De Geus, 2010) by Deedee Derksen. It’s fresh and topical, the fruit of Derksen’s past four years living and working in Afghanistan, mostly reporting for the Dutch left-leaning newspaper De Volkskrant. I was particularly interested to see that in some ways she shared my own confusion about the country, especially about the Taliban and women.
Derksen meets women who tell her that life was actually o.k. under the Taliban, and that things had gone downhill since they were driven from power. The bigger problem in women’s lives was violence and chaos. Schools for girls were all very well, but rights were not much use without honest courts to enforce them. As Derksen says: “I would hear from rural women that there was no change in their lives before or after the Taliban” and that, compared to deeper problems like unemployment and power cuts, “Western concerns with cultural matters just poured oil on the flames.”
Derksen’s mission to Afghanistan took flight when her new posting was announced at a public event, at which her Volkskrant editor was challenged about the lack of coverage of the ‘other side’ by Joris Luyendijk, an ex-journalist Dutch commentator known for his iconoclasm about Dutch coverage of Middle East news in his book Het Zijn Net Mensen, recently published in English as Hello Everybody. But she soon finds herself wrapped up in the expatriate whirl of Kabul.
“The crazy thing is that as a war correspondent in Afghanistan it’s not at all easy to get to the war,” she says, despite the fact, as she details, the Pentagon spends an annual $4.7 billion on public relations and employs 27,000 people to supply upbeat pictures and stories for the press corps. One of the Pentagons front-line media handlers digs up Derksen’s file in their computer, along with her picture and an evaluation of her reports. If a reporter is judged to be “negative”, this handler says, the Pentagon will cut him or her off.
She’s judged to be neutral and gets to see a terrifying part of the American side of the war in a distant mountain valley: “that’s it, people: bombs, grenades, and fear so pure that you begin believing in God on the spot”. But she’s frustrated that she can’t hear at first hand what Afghan villages think of what is being done in their name, and worries that maybe she’s giving a one-dimensional, Hollywood rewrite of what people already think the war is. She gets hooked on the idea of getting to the bottom of it all, and of not being like the Westerners in their “luxury jail” in Kabul, who speak about what Afghans think without ever speaking to Afghans. “The more often I went [to Kabul], the more often I wanted to go. It was a sort of gold rush fever.”
Panning for this gold was tough. Travel proved dangerous and the risk of kidnapping great. Afghan militants targeted Westerners, be they journalists, aid workers or diplomats. Reporting was a juggling act of managing fixers, telephone calls to Taliban commanders, swapping information with local journalists, opportunistic interviews in Kabul with provincial visitors, and occasional sorties into the countryside. Western soldiers appear as almost accidental actors. One Dutch lieutenant studied to be a hotelier and tells Derksen “and then I went and did this.” An American “Major B”, who only “lives in the world of Major B”, gives her bibles to study admits that he is busy trying to proselytize the Afghan population – and then advises her to read Tolkien, “an author at home in the Christian tradition”. She attends a painstakingly arranged town-hall meeting between the American troops and Afghans, at which the Americans rush away before listening to anybody. And, of course, editors all want it summed up in 700 words, with villain and victim clearly identified.
She admits that sometimes, the more she hears about the real Afghanistan war, the less she understands. Reporting one story, “every Mohammad says the other Mohammad is a murderer, which the said Mohammad admits, while pointing the finger straight back. At Mohammad.” There are tales of head-hacking cruelty by the Taliban, for sure, but she attacks the myth of any ideological divide between Taliban and non-Taliban, says non-Pashtuns do not necessarily rule out cooperating with the group and that the Karzai government is in a semi-permanent negotiation with them about its own survival. Above all, she notes that no Afghan faction is necessarily more ‘Islamic’ than another, all having shared in an upsurge in religious extremism and violence during the past decades of war.
Among ordinary Afghans, she finds farmers have little incentive to cultivate more than poppies for opium, since there are no refrigerated stores or roads to transport vegetables or other normal crops. During an attempt to track down the financing of an aid project, she finds that everyone believes a different sum of money is involved. Afghans feel Koran schools are preferable to no schools at all; yet ignorance means that young, poor, illiterate Afghans are susceptible to anything, from acting as suicide bombers to believing that American soldiers’ sunglasses mean they can see straight through you. She reaches one Afghan village to find its conservatism a façade, with everything for sale in secret, from whisky to opium to prostitutes, be they young or old, women or men. “All very hypocritical,” the phlegmatic local Afghan governor tells her.
She shows again and again how the chief ingredient of the Afghanistan war is village feuds, sometimes magnified by Western arms and support into province-wide conflicts that are mistakenly interpreted as being struggles about the fate of the Kabul regime. She finds that storied gunfights between American troops and the “Taliban” can also be described more simply as clashes between the Americans and “armed men who hate the Americans”, fueled in part by a high rate of civilian Afghan casualties rarely admitted to by the Pentagon press machine. Between Afghans, the role of victim and killer has switched so often that everyone is performing in both roles, all waiting for their chance of a sign of weakness to “hold the other’s head under the water.”
Derksen’s strongest criticism is of the Western governments, who ignored Afghanistan for too long and still give it far less support for reconstruction than other post-conflict situations. (In East Timor, she says there was one international peacekeeper for every 65 people; the figure is one for every 5,380 in Afghanistan). The US is blamed for storming in like cowboys in 2001, shooting for al-Qaeda and hiring anyone who would help, however corrupt. “The US and other NATO countries pretend that there is a properly functioning government, but there isn’t”, she quotes a disillusioned American aid worker as saying. “It’s a band of criminals who are raping the country. We pretend that we’re not responsible, but we are.”
Looking at the four-year Dutch misadventure trying and failing to bring peace and development to the province of Uruzgan, she asks whether The Hague had ever thought through what it meant to take their mission into a place where the US was arming and supporting a regional faction that was clearly oppressing many local people – and on whose support the Dutch also relied for their lifeline of convoy-borne supplies. Or was The Hague in fact fully aware of the situation, sending in its troops simply to be a good U.S. ally, and never mind about the fate of the Afghans? The whole disaster, she reckons, was a bad piece of theater that could only be called “War For the Wrong People Against the Wrong People.”
I read much of Tea with the Taliban on a transatlantic flight, and on arrival in the U.S. I did some occasional testing of its findings. Indeed, judging by my straw poll of experiences and conversations over a week, America still seemed to be both aware of and disconnected from the Afghan reality. Shawn, my driver from the airport to a lecture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, knew a thing or two. His best friend was serving on the Afghan side of the Pakistan border, and had just been back home to tell of his experiences. The poor friend was apparently strung out as taut as the trip-wire of an IED, drinking heavily as he told of his ‘seven confirmed kills’, of being administered military drugs to stay awake on night duties, and, in a telling irony, of being unable to see as much from his base watchtower with state of the art night-sight equipment as his Afghan army companion could see with his bare eyes. On top of that, as Derksen often points out, he was utterly sealed off from the Afghan civilian population.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
On the first morning of my visit, the hotel’s complimentary copy of USA Today had just one page of foreign news. Half of it was a story called “Afghan villagers stronger against Taliban” (here). The US general in charge of a province, perhaps in charge of Shawn’s friend, was claiming that a new strategy aimed at making Afghan villages defend themselves was working. This was an interesting claim, given that Derksen shows in her book that it is precisely in the villages that the Afghan war starts and Western influence ends. And, illustrating another of Derksen’s complaints, there wasn’t a single Afghan voice in the piece, let alone a quote from the Taliban, or any sign that the reporter had been able to go to an Afghan village to check out if indeed its inhabitants felt stronger. Instead the report was just assertions by the military, accompanied by a few vague ‘to be sure’ paragraphs, which, if taken seriously, would actually contradict the military claims, and, indeed, the whole point of writing the story. As International Crisis Group says in its new report on Afghanistan: “An alluring narrative of a successful counter-insurgency campaign has begun to take shape, but the storyline does not match facts on the ground.” Or, as a recent call by some of the best writers on and aid workers in Afghanistan put it, “the military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a cure.” The only verified new fact in that USA Today report appeared to be the obituary notice naming two more young American soldiers in their early 20s killed by an IED in Kandahar.
Photo: David Gilkey/NPR
(The coverage is not all like this, of course. Much more to the point was another piece done around the same time for National Public Radio’s intrepid Quil Lawrence (here). Jumping from helicopters perilously perched on cliff-edges, Quil laconically reveals the mindlessness of the war and how little communication there is even within the various U.S. groups trying to get a grip on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – let alone between the Americans and the Afghans themselves.)
My other conversations in America did not encourage me to believe that much was about to change. Amherst, I was told by the generous professorial hosts of my visit for an evening lecture about Turkey’s new strategic choices, is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the United States, with 8000 candidates for 400 places every year. Yet not a single student showed up for a brown-bag lunch organized to discuss journalism and the Middle East. In Washington DC, a highly placed former US official informed me that there was no chance of the US leaving Afghanistan in 2014, as is being publicly suggested. Yet the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not even feature in the recent mid-term election campaign.
If anger about these expensive and damaging conflicts was being expressed anywhere, it was in worsening sentiment blaming all Muslims for the trouble. The Moroccan immigrant who drove me away from Amherst was sanguine about his personal safety, but said that the real enemy was ignorance, the problem that writers like Derksen and I are trying to combat with books about Middle Eastern realities on the ground. “I came to the U.S. to be a guide to the Moroccan pavilion at Disney world, and that’s the kind of place where you really find out how little people know about what goes on outside America,” he said. “One person looked at me and asked if in Morocco we lived in the trees.”
Minding one’s Ps and al-Qs
I love reading the Economist from cover to cover. Their Middle East coverage can be especially good, even if I sometimes disagree with their editorials. The way the Economist really writes the news makes a more lasting imprint on my mind than other media. I always envy the pithy puns in the headlines, too. In the 30 January edition, however, I found that it had fallen prey to the more subtle and often inadvertant problem that I often dealt with as a reporter in U.S. newspapers – omission.
The 2-1/2 page article, the showcase of the International section, laid out plausibly effective measures to counter al-Qaeda. Three lines did quote Osama bin Laden saying he’d fight on until the U.S. dropped its support of Israel, but mostly passed over the way so many of the main actors in al-Qaeda say that what first pushed them into the group or its way of thinking was anger over Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.
These include Mohammed Atta and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed of 9/11 notoriety, or the recent bomber of the CIA in Afghanistan, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, at least according to the testimony of his Turkish wife. In Dining with al-Qaeda, I also recount how mayhem in Israel-Palestine overshadowed a visit I made a few days after Sept. 11 to the home of one of the pilots, Marwan al-Shehhi, in the Gulf sheikhdom of Ras al-Khaimah.
Bringing up the subject is not to justify the terrorist acts of these people, or the warped way in which such groups brain-wash their adherents before sending them to kill and be killed. But one of the points I try to illustrate in Dining with al-Qaeda is that as long as we refuse to acknowledge and deal with problems that fill the swamp of frustration and anger from which al-Qaeda has emerged, nobody will be able to settle the problems that result.
So for once I gathered myself up and wrote to a letter to the Economist. To my astonishment they printed my letter, as below, on 27 February. They even used my suggested headline.
Minding your Ps and al-Qs
SIR – Prevention, Pursuit, Protection, Preparation, and Perseverance: all may help parry al-Qaeda, as you proposed (“The bombs that stopped the happy talk”, January 30th). But you neglected a principal plank of al-Qaeda propaganda, spelled out in Arabic in the picture accompanying your article: “Neither America, nor any person living in America, will dream of security until we really live in security in Palestine.”
Al-Qaeda may be duplicitous in exploiting Muslim opinion about the West’s bias towards Israel, but the West would be imprudent to pass over the real anger provoked by unbalanced support for Israel. Al-Qaeda militants have often said their first steps were motivated by a desire to exact revenge for Israeli actions. So how about promoting a sixth P to plug the flow of recruits to such groups: peace, through fair play in the Middle East? That way, the plosives might indeed begin to overpower the explosives.
HUGH POPE
Istanbul
Al-Qaeda spells out its recruiting platform
US media in the Middle East – letter to Democracy Journal
In its Spring 2010 edition, the Washington DC-based periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas published this letter from me arguing that American media’s responsibility for the U.S. invasion of Iraq results from a broader problem than just a tendency to kow-tow to the former government of President Bush … a situation I’d come to see clearly while writing Dining with al-Qaeda.
Issue #16, Spring 2010
Letters to the Editor
by Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
The Media and Iraq, Eight Years On
Leslie Gelb and Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati make useful points about the failure of the “elite press” to be critical enough of U.S. policies before and during the invasion of Iraq [“Mission Unaccomplished,“ Issue #13]. As the only correspondent who reported from Iraq in the year before the war for one of the newspapers they refer to, The Wall Street Journal, I would like to raise more fundamental issues that foreign correspondents like me faced in tackling the onrush of the Iraq war. These are the problems that are endemic in reporting anything about the Middle East in a U.S. newspaper.
Some of these obstacles are cultural, not political. American readers like, and editors look for, stories with American characters, transparent motives, and happy endings. We pulled punches in order not to disturb Americans’ comfort zones: minimizing bloody violence, boiling hatreds, and the Western role in plotting coups and stoking up at least 15 major wars and revolutions that have crippled Middle Eastern societies over the last century.
Instead, we all played roles in constructing familiar but artificial narratives: an Arab-Israeli “peace process” that has never proceeded anywhere, a misleading scenario of regional struggle between “moderates” and “radicals,” a myth of American neutrality, and analysis confused by one-size-fits-all labels like “Islam,” “Arab world,” and “terror.” The “elite press” thus helped build a wall of incomprehension between American readers and the realities of the region. Unsurprisingly, the average American in 2002 had a hard time understanding what was going on anywhere in the Middle East, let alone in Iraq. Additionally, especially in the case of the Journal, readers’ and policy makers’ opinions in the run-up to the war were surely swayed by largely unchallenged articles in the opinion pages by hard-line Israelis and their American supporters, making what soon proved to be fallacious assertions about America’s duty to invade Iraq. At the same time, for much of the 2000-2002 period, the Journal’s news pages didn’t even have an Israel correspondent.
It was hard to see all this while working in the field. At the time, when I tried to alert readers to the folly of the Iraq war, I felt like a blade of grass flattened by a gale force wind of pro-war sentiment. I often just felt depressed, even emasculated, and I understood how tempting and empowering it must have felt to be able to join the militarist charge.
It is humbling to realize that this flattened-grass effect is how journalists in authoritarian regimes feel most of the time. I remain thankful that, unlike them, I was not also trampled underfoot. In the Journal’s news pages, my editors were honest and rigorous, and they printed my dissident stories, even if the problems mentioned above did distort, diminish, and delay our coverage. My field-based analysis on the historic folly of invading Iraq or any Middle Eastern country did eventually grace the front page of the newspaper. But it only appeared on the day before the tanks started rolling in.
Hugh Pope
Istanbul, Turkey
(Original can be viewed here).
First copy sold, but … an author’s lament
What’s an author to do when he hears that, before his new book is even printed or presented, it’s been sold in the charity shops for a couple of bucks?
I love being a writer. I wouldn’t want to be anything else. But sometimes my trade feels like an uphill struggle.
- My first commercially published article, a purple portrait of the Syrian village where I moved in 1982 to try to perfect my Arabic, took me three agonizing weeks to write.
In my twenties, I felt guilty that I couldn’t write that brilliant young man’s book that my father always said I should. When I turned 30, a potential London publisher finally offered a meagre 200 pounds sterling for my first idea. He never paid up, yet a few months later he was stalking me round my house, asking for it back. That episode set me back five years.
In fact it took me at least a decade to work out how that first book should be and what it should say. As the Turks put it, to be a real expert, first you should first have eaten your way through ten bakeries’ weight of bread.
Then comes the search for publication. Floating a book idea always feels like going against the grain — after all, if it is a really new approach to a subject, no publisher can be expected to have heard of it or believe in it. But self-publishing is not a real option, being like talking to the mirror — and even T.E. Lawrence went deep into debt when he tried it with Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
The first time round, I was lucky (thanks again, Gail Pirkis) to be signed up under the gaze of Lord Byron’s portrait at the fine old house of John Murray in London’s Mayfair. The next time, two publishers actually wanted me to do books on new horizons in Central Asia. Too busy to think, I tried to merge the two ideas. I ended up losing both contracts and having to return my advance. (Don’t believe that business about ‘they can’t get it back’).
And writing takes time, so much time. Books don’t pay enough to be a day job, so you end up working through the night. Still, I persevered, straining relationships, blaming problems on flighty agents, and piling up inadequate and unpaid leaves of absence.
At last, the manuscript is ready. Sending off a first draft, however, always turns out to be just a new beginning. Months of agonized waiting ensue as I wonder if my work will be liked or not. When the text finally returns, either the editor has done so little I feel he couldn’t possibly care, or she has really made the text fly, making me feel subtly inadequate and possibly illiterate.
All along, of course, I continue to pester friends and family to read the great work and make comments, which they almost never do. Frustrations mount and it usually takes a whole year for a book to be properly edited, published and marketed (and I count myself lucky – my poet friend John Ash is typically writing two or three volumes ahead of his publisher, who lags several years behind).
And then, miraculously, as rivals are conquering market share and the subject slides out of fashion, the book’s inner meaning suddenly becomes clear to me. I find myself begging the publisher to accept yet more alterations that might delay things yet again.
Months of worrying follow about who to ask for an endorsement, whether or not a third reminder message is appropriate, and whether it is a bad sign that half the people that say they will send a blurb never actually do. Control slips further as the author experiences the agony and the ecstasy of Great Review Lottery. Then comes the organization of a book launch week– and these days, that’s a lucky bonus — in which 200 people might present themselves for a creamy soiree at the Smithsonian, or in which just three people turn up for a bookshop signing, including the visiting relative, the tipsy functionary and the passer-by.
In short, by the time the actual publication date looms close, the author almost has no energy to keep the fire burning under any remaining hopes of high-flying speaking engagements, multinational book tours and best-seller fame.
At exactly such a moment in the trajectory of Dining with al-Qaeda, fate chose to deal a new authorial blow below the belt.
A friendly acquaintance in the State Department, two months before publication of my new book, and indeed before it had even been printed, cheerfully sent a message to say he had bought a copy and was half-way through it already.
How on earth?! I asked.
It turns out that the first copy of Dining with al-Qaeda knowingly sold is one of the galley proofs, sent off earlier to someone on the publicist’s list of the great and the good, and apparently just as rapidly passed on to a second-hand bookshop.
My friend vows that he wants buy the proper edition, and I know I should just be grateful he’s so keen to read it. Perhaps I should be happy that even one of those galleys – floppy, and with ink that rubs off the cheap paper pages – has some resale value.
Still, it hurts to see any new sign that an author should never expect that writing books will ever be more than a hobby, and that I should treat any actual income as a happy surprise.
So why do we do it? We writers can’t help pouring out reams of words, gushing like oil wells or blathering like bloggers. If we stop, there’s always somebody else ready to gush instead. And if anyone had found a way to make regular money out of books, the publishing industry would not look like it has done for so long.
The secret, perhaps, is what my former boss Gareth Evans used to call ‘psychic income’ (useful in all respects when it could substitute for real income in our NGO, International Crisis Group). A book can produce plenty of that. I got lucky when I heard that my Turkey Unveiled was on President Clinton’s reading list as he headed to Turkey, or when a Kazakh student in America sent a touching message to say that while reading my second book Sons of the Conquerors, he discovered an important and unknown part of his Turkic self.
My charity shop-visiting diplomat friend also well knows the value of a morale-boosting dose of this miraculous substance, and succeeded in soothing my ruffled authorial feathers: “Needless to say,” he purred, Dining with al-Qaeda “is a very good read.”
And indeed, what more can a writer want or hope for?
Bricks in the wall of incomprehension about the Middle East
Leafing through the summer 2009 edition of Washington’s “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas”, I stumbled across an interesting critique of the U.S. media performance in the run-up to, during, and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – a central theme of the last quarter of my new book, Dining with al-Qaeda.
In the article, Leslie Gelb and Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati made useful points in their survey of the failure of the “elite press” to be critical enough of U.S. policies. But as the only correspondent who reported from Iraq in the year before the war for one of the newspapers they refer to, the Wall Street Journal, I believe we should add other factors into the account.
This Iraqi of Mosul drew a syringe full of his own blood to write on his arm “Yes, Yes to the Leader”. Did he genuinely love Saddam? Did he hate Saddam, but fear that Baathist commissars suspected his disloyalty? Was it all a show for visiting foreign correspondents? Any answer might have been right in the crazed atmosphere as Saddam demanded and extracted 100 per cent support for his rule in an October 2002 referendum. How could we explain in short, hurriedly reported stories the many layers of a Saddamized Iraqi reality to a suburban American newspaper reader, far away in every respect? And how could we explain that if this average American had been through the traumas visited upon Iraq in recent decades, that he or she too would likely have become similarly psychologically disturbed? Photo: Jessica Lutz
As Gelb and Zelmati say, grand publications still have the resources, expertise and vocation to be key examiners of government policy; that Administrations and Congress cannot be trusted to give an unbiased version of their own role in events; that think tanks can be superficial and ideological; and that news stories often stress politics above understanding of policy, usually due to non-specialist writers’ lack of substantive knowledge. I also welcome the finding that stories by reporters in the field stand up better to the test of time than those written from cubicles in Washington DC.
The authors’ recommendations are also fine as far as they go: editors should support reporters to mount challenges to the system; news should be analysed more; field reporters should be rotated through Washington; and journalism schools should do more succinct, quick analysis of coverage. Still, as I try to explain in the caption of the accompanying photo, foreign correspondents like me faced more fundamental issues as we tackled the onrush of the Iraq war, problems that are endemic in reporting anything about the Middle East in a U.S. newspaper.
These include the fact that readers like, and editors look for, stories with American characters, transparent motivations and happy endings, which build a quite unrepresentative picture of the region. We often pulled punches in order not to disturb Americans’ comfort zones, minimizing the bloody side of the violence, caricaturing the boiling hatreds, and stepping lightly round the Western role in stoking up at least 15 major wars and revolutions that have devastated Middle Eastern societies over the last century.
We thus all played small roles in constructing artificial narratives instead: an Arab-Israeli “peace process” that has never proceeded anywhere, a misleading scenario of regional struggle between “moderates” and “radicals”, a myth of American neutrality and analysis confused by one-size-fits-all labels like “Islam”, “Arab world” and “terror”. Over decades, the “elite press” has thus helped build a wall of incomprehension between American readers and the realities of the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, the average American has a hard time understanding what’s going on anywhere in the region, let alone in Iraq.
Additionally, in the specific case of the Journal, readers’ and policy makers’ opinions in the run-up to the war were surely swayed by long, regular and prominent articles in the opinion pages by hard-line Israelis, making what soon proved to be fallacious assertions about America’s interest and duty to invade Iraq. At the same time, for much of the 2000-2002 period, the Journal‘s news pages didn’t even have a dedicated Israel correspondent.
It was hard to see all this while working in the field, and I only came to this fuller realization of what lay behind our 2002/2003 frustrations while writing Dining with al-Qaeda. At the time, being a reporter trying to alert the U.S. to the folly of the Iraq war felt like being a blade of grass flattened by a gale force wind of pro-war sentiment. I often just felt depressed, even emasculated, and understood how tempting and empowering it must have felt to be able to join the pro-war charge.
It is humbling to realize that this flattened-grass effect is how journalists in authoritarian regimes feel all the time. I remain thankful that, unlike them, and unlike the man from Mosul above, I was not trampled underfoot as well. In the Journal‘s news pages, my editors were honest and rigorous, and they did usually print my dissident stories, even if the problems mentioned above tended to distort, diminish and delay our coverage.
For instance, it was only in January 2003 that I started working up a full analysis of the historic folly of invading Iraq (or any other Middle Eastern country). It was two months before we could all agree that it was ready to grace the front page of the newspaper. That was on 19 March — the day before the tanks started rolling in.
Tank tracks in Babylon
John Ash writes poetry that I really love, and his new collection “In the Wake of the Day”, just published by Carcanet, once again offers great moments of hovering between East and West, ancient and modern, the personal and the historical.
Ash nearly drops his pose of elegant nonchalance once or twice when he edges close to the vicious sides of the contemporary Middle East and the insouciant West’s share of responsibility for the mess. “Babylon” asks the reader to “remember the shattered windows of the stores,/the blood smeared on torn newspaper … tank tracks are driven over Babylon.” More representative of the typical Middle Eastern condition, perhaps, is “The Cut,” as people rush home on a snowy winter evening and the lights go out – again. “The grid overloads. The power fails./It is like this often. We shift and change,/Slipping to a poor, third place.” And Ash has all his pithy poise at hand in this short meditation:
Olives
In the lands to the west of the Jordan
Olive groves were guarded by the soldiers of the kings
By night and day, and the destruction
Of a single tree was punishable by death
Or mutilation. This is no longer the case,
But I am not convinced of the improvement.
We’re neighbours in Istanbul, so I guess that it’s no surprise that we share many of the same perspectives, which I try to capture in down-to-earth, anecdotal prose in Dining with al-Qaeda. I wish I could get away with the grand historical sweep beloved by Ash, as here in “Difficult”, a poem in which he mocks his incurable name-dropping of ancient oddities, then unrepentantly wraps his poem up with the couplet:
Let us now consider with care the lost
Recital platforms of Sogdiana.
Hugh Pope 