Overview

Nir Rosen has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as the reporter who managed to get inside Fallujah at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters, and as one of the few Western reporters able to report the truth from Iraq. Still in his twenties, a freelancer who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, Rosen speaks Iraqi-accented Arabic and has managed to report from some of the country's most dangerous locales. Even The Weekly Standard notes that he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter.

Rosen knows better than anyone how much the Americans are hated, and how deeply the Sunni Iraqis hate the Shias and vice versa. He has listened to the insurgents, and he knows that they will never rest until the Americans are gone. Too many Sunnis and Shias are willing to use violence for Iraq to ever have peace. The overthrow of Saddam has proved to be nothing less than a triumph for the martyrs who use violence at every turn.

Ever since the fall of Saddam's regime Rosen has been in and out of Iraq, from north to south, listening to Friday sermons in mosques, breaking bread with dangerous men, interviewing political henchmen, joining Shia pilgrims, and listening to ordinary Iraqis who face American soldiers on raids in the Sunni triangle. He has had to plead for his life at times, and he has received more than one death threat. He has been pres-ent when bombs were detonated, and he has sat in meetings of insurgent leaders as they made policy decisions about territory they controlled. He has heard the double messages of Iraqi leaders -- the careful English messages for Western ears and the unvarnished hostility in Arabic -- and he has interviewed politicians and imams and seen how the insurgents and gang leaders create militias, private courts, prisons, security services, and more.

In the Belly of the Green Bird is a searing report, unlike any other book about the American experience in Iraq. Almost everything covered in the Western media has been at least one or two steps removed from the minds and acts of the people who will determine the future of Iraq. Some of them are peaceful, some are violent. Some of them hate one another with the intensity of ancient enemies. The depth of discord between Sunnis and Shias is difficult to fathom without listening to them. Their anti-Americanism is much more recent, but not much less intense. The divisions within this cobbled-together country, much like those within Yugoslavia after Tito, are simply too intense to contain.

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To go by current polls, most Americans think American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. To judge by freelance journalist Rosen's account, most Iraqis agree. It is hard for Americans to understand just how deeply they are hated by ordinary Iraqis, writes Rosen, who has been covering Iraq since the first days of the invasion. That invasion-which a hopeful Bush administration deemed a liberation -swiftly became an occupation, which, Rosen writes, translates into Arabic as ihtilal, the term applied to such historical events as the Crusaders' invasions of the Holy Land, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in the 13th century and the British dominion over Mesopotamia early in the 20th century. In that light, the honorable thing to do is resist, and the call to do so made some unlikely alliances among sworn enemies, the Sunni and Shia sects that have since plunged Iraq into civil war. Long oppressed in Iraq, the Shias were the ones who, war planners assured us, were supposed to greet the Americans with bouquets; instead, as early as April 2003, Rosen writes, Shia crowds were out in the streets calling for death to America (and Israel, of course), while learned Shia clerics informed their followers that the Americans were only in Iraq for the oil, guided there by global Masons. Free to engage in politics since the fall of Saddam, the Shias swiftly formed an organized resistance against the new Mongols, namely the American army, which does not acquit itself well whenever it turns up in Rosen's pages; the GIs, it seems, know better than to go bursting into mosques, say, but their officers tell them that that's the reason they have guns. Of course, the former members of Iraq's Hussein-era armed forces have guns, too, and so do the al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, and so does everyone else arrayed against the invaders. Sobering reading, and yet more evidence against the neocon adventure in the Middle East. (Kirkus Reviews)

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