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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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The recent United States–led invasion of Iraq has been the most intensely reported war in history. Much of the reporting came from US military sources and reporters “embedded” with the troops as they made their way toward the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. But a small group of reporters spent the four weeks of the war in Baghdad. Among them was Sydney Morning Herald writer-at-large Paul McGeough, the sole Australian.
In Baghdad follows on from his earlier book Manhattan to Baghdad, a recounting and analysis of various aspects of the war on terror beginning with the terrorist attacks of September 11. It collects McGeough’s reports filed from Baghdad over the 28 days of the war, but with the addition of fascinating elements from his own diary.
These additional notes provide glimpses of stories behind the news and the challenges of a journalist in a war zone. There are the restrictions imposed by the former Iraqi regime; the technological improvisation in difficult circumstances; and the high risks of reporting from a dangerous place.
“In this war reporters were dying—proportionately—at a rate that was about 10 times greater than the US and British military deaths,” McGeough reports.
An intriguing element to this book is McGeough’s personal reactions. In the midst of the carnage and danger of war, he regularly asks himself why he is there. He recounts one evening in the early days of the war, when he and his fellow reporters were called to al-Shuala, a small marketplace in which as many as 58 civilians were killed by an American bomb gone astray.
At about 1 am while waiting for transport back to his hotel, the question recurs: “It’s during such moments, spent standing on a median strip waiting for an unknown ride in an unknown city in the middle of the night, that you sometimes wonder about this job. Why?” But as he pondered this question, he was struck by the significance of his role: “I was filled with an overpowering sense that somebody from the outside world had to be in al-Shuala this night; someone had to be bearing witness.”
And it is this facet of McGeough’s account that is most profound. Apart from military and political implications of the progress of the war, he’s keenly alert to the impact of the war on the ordinary people of Iraq. The Baghdadi reactions to the war range from the stubborn attempts to maintain a semblance of normalcy for as long as possible despite heavy bombing, to the grief-stricken anger of the innocent victims to the mayhem of looting upon the fall of the former regime.
McGeough tells the stories of the people on the street. Perhaps the most profound statement comes from a mother of a 23-year-old civilian shot for failing to stop at a US checkpoint. McGeough describes her beautiful but tragic face and reports her simple words: “He was innocent. We were on our way home. Why do the Americans do this? God forgive them.”
It’s a challenging response among many harsher and angrier voices McGeough collects on the streets of Baghdad.
But McGeough is also interested in the wider effects of the war in Iraq and a country that’s been suddenly turned upside down. “Americans might be offended by a comparison with September 11,” he writes. “But if that traumatised the US, how do we measure the impact of such a rapid, high-powered military invasion on the life of ordinary Iraqis? A tyrant is gone, but in the same flash so too is the only form of social and economic order that most Iraqis have known . . . they must also confront the vulgarity of war and the further diminution of lives that were already grim enough, but which for Iraqis were ‘normal.’”
In Baghdad provides a different and more independent perspective on the war in Iraq. It’s a rough story from a dangerous place. In the midst of these realities, McGeough bears witness to both suffering and endurance—and raises many important questions.
Paul McGeough, In Baghdad: A Reporter’s War, Allen & Unwin, 2003, 292 pages.
Extract from Signs of the Times, January February 2004 .
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