New Yorker picks mind-opening Iraq book for its monthly book club
After just now cryptically posting a couple of paragraphs from The Weight of a Mustard Seed, I Googled the author’s name and was happy to learn that The New Yorker selected the book for its online book club this month. There may be other books like it, but I haven’t seen them.
Steavenson spent her time in Iraq trying to learn Iraqi stories. Her Iraqis aren’t merely victims. They aren’t just nocturnal phantoms placing roadside bombs. They are people. As such, they are messy. Like us. And like us, they can be exasperating. Here’s another passage, as Steavenson questions a devout young man about 9/11:
“So what do you think about September 11th?”
Ahmed blinked. “The attacks on New York?”
“Yes. When the two great buildings were destroyed.”
“Yes, it was jihad.” Ahmed smiled. “I was very happy.”
“But why jihad against America.”
“As long as it is attacking any Muslim country there can be jihad against America.”
“But what Muslim country was it attacking in 2001?”
“Many different countries.” Ahmed insisted. “But especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they slaughtered most of them.”
I patiently explained that America had not slaughtered Bosnian Muslims and had in fact defended Kosovar Muslims against the Serbs. Again, I asked Ahmed directly: so where was America attacking Muslims in 2001?
Ahmed bent his answer in a different direction. “It fights Islam in an indirect way. I don’t know exactly. But America puts pressure on Muslims. It’s a lot of countries. Specifically, I don’t know.”
It’s tempting to extrapolate from this jumbled caricature of America and say that this is why Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld turned out to be so wrong, that this why our soldiers were not greeted as liberators. That’s overly simplistic and willfully ignorant of the larger lesson of the book — that Iraqis, like anybody else, are individuals and that we can’t hope to understand them by sorting them into handy batches. Even so, Ahmed’s words reinforce my conviction that the invasion of Iraq was doomed from the start to win us more enemies than friends.
