Season of the Assassins

With the announcement today that two more Western journalists have died covering the treacherous wars in the Middle East--this time in Syria--perhaps this is a fitting recognition of their perilous work.


On Nir Rosen and Patrick Cockburn

"In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

Nir Rosen

One of the most competent independent journalists to report out of Iraq at the height of the U.S. occupation and civil war, Nir Rosen is the author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, the best book I read during the second Iraq war.

Among the handful of books that actually focused on the socio-cultural repercussions of the war rather than merely critiquing its methodologies—America could have gotten it right after all, or so some opine—Green Bird offered an amazingly intimate look at Iraqi resistance.

While interviewing U.S. supporters among the Iraqi elites, he also talked to Al-Qaeda operatives, disgruntled shopkeepers, apolitical cynics, and many others given short-shrift by most Western journalists’ coverage of the war. The result was a book with better balance and more depth than much of the Iraq War canon.

Rosen, an Iranian-American born in New York City, melded into the streets of Baghdad and towns and villages throughout the country to talk to hundreds of ordinary Iraqis about the travails in their lives during wartime. Many of the Iraqis he talked to were different than the leaders who emerged from the initial power-brokering by Paul Bremer's Provisional Authority. Their interests did not merge directly with big oil and the huge government contracts being passed around in the initial frenzied turn from dictatorship to American puppet-state.

As was predictable when a corporatist state like America dished its power, the little guys in Iraq were run over, figuratively and literally, by the war machine during the all-out rush to seize the spoils of a shattered nation.

Rosen’s work is equal to that of another journalist whose work I admire, Patrick Cockburn of Britain’s Independent. Two of the best correspondents working today, they were fearless in their coverage of the war and could not be ignored. They did the brave and painstaking job of talking to the stratified populace of the nation before analyzing and reporting the nuances of realpolitik in Iraq.

And they did it when few others were willing to take the risk, which as we learned again today, is considerable when covering the Middle East.


TS