Pulitzer Winner Shadid Plans Return to Baghdad After Writing Book

By: Barbara Bedway With a Pulitzer Prize and other recent awards to his credit, Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is taking a six-month leave to finish a book about his experiences in Iraq both before and since the start of the current conflict. After writing from the relative calm of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he is a visiting scholar, Shadid plans to return to the Middle East for the Post next fall. He will be based in Beirut, though he anticipates spending most of his time, once again, in Baghdad.

He acknowledges his return to the States this spring has been a little unsettling: "Probably the most difficult thing is Iraq being transformed from a life experience into a policy debate."

His book will follow several families he met in Iraq before and during the war. "I'm struck by how much of what happened turned out as Iraqis feared it would," he says. In a story written just days before the fall of Baghdad, Shadid reported one local family's longing for normalcy, but fear of impending chaos: "They predicted little ? stability ahead. From a bloody battle for the capital, to lawlessness, to the humiliation of an occupation, they braced for a future that hardly anyone in Baghdad dares to predict."

Shadid notes that the continuing lack of security in the country has put both lives and the truth at risk, with "danger for journalists" still high. "Isolation is debilitating," he observes. "Journalists can develop a real bunker mentality. Just as the Coalition Provisional Authority members are too isolated from the people to govern, the same thing can happen to journalists ? they get too isolated to cover the real story."

During his last weeks in Iraq this spring, he made it to Nasiriyah. "I understand it's eased up," he says in mid-May, "but the last few weeks I was in Nasiriyah, I was really uncomfortable.There had been kidnappings a few days earlier and mortars and gunfire that night.The driver and I woke up and said, 'This is crazy,' and headed back to Baghdad. I think the kidnapping, in particular, spooked my driver."

Shadid, a Lebanese-American who is fluent in Arabic and has reported throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world, spent his time relentlessly interviewing people. "It struck me how far ahead of the story you could be by spending a lot of time talking to people," he points out. "You'd hear the demands happening at the local level ? demands for elections, frustrations about the constitution." He instantly saw how strong an issue Shiite empowerment was going to be on the day the Saddam statue fell.

"You heard Shiites doing lutm, beating their chests, essentially," he recalls. "The Shiites knew they were now the majority, and they were looking for the power that goes with that. Spending time in the Arab world, I saw how Islamists used social networks to build support. You saw this play out in Iraq after Baghdad fell. Within days, a social welfare network had been set up in Sadr City. The pace of change is breathtaking."

Shadid has another, unfortunate advantage when it comes to covering war: He knows, from his days with the Boston Globe, what it's like to be a civilian casualty. "I was shot in the back in Ramallah by the Israeli Army," he says, still sounding incredulous that he survived the shot that went through one shoulder and out the other, knocking off the tip of his spine. "I was sitting in the middle of the street, and thought I was going to die. That fear, isolation, and sense of menace ? I felt that a lot in Baghdad."

In the book, he plans to explore at length the two very different mindsets he feels were in play from the conflict's beginnings. "I never saw the two sides on the same page," he says. "It was an impressive experience to see the cold, relentless way the war was prosecuted. Iraqis expected the peace to be prosecuted like the war. They expected, as in other coups, that the new power comes in, immediately institutes a curfew, gets rid of the top echelons of the old government. But it was unlike how every other coup had unfolded.

"I feel the Iraqis never signed on to this 'Big Ambition' for Iraq, to be the engine for change in the Arab world," he ruefully notes. "Iraqis are the most American of Arabs ? forthright, confrontational, very resilient, with a can-do attitude. However, this sense of identity is distinct from the West. Even in an Arab country with these similarities, there are deep reservations about their identity and protecting their culture and identity from the West."

The book for now is untitled. "My editors have universally denounced my titles," he says wryly. "But I know the subject, and I have the outline."