War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq
*Starred Review* Anyone who has followed television coverage of the Iraq War knows NBC’s Engel. As chronicled in his first book, A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest (2004), he snuck into Baghdad as a freelance journalist to report on “shock and awe.” This is what he’s seen in the five years since, and while some readers will want to turn away from the horror and brutality, Engel bears witness to what has been done to the people of Iraq and what they are doing to each other. Reported in an almost herky-jerky manner, as befitting a journalist who hears gunfire as a lullaby, this memoir offers stunning testimony of man’s inhumanity to man and, perhaps even more forcefully, of the havoc that our most firmly held ideals, whether about democracy or religion, can wreak on human lives. Underlying the mayhem is Engel’s contention, amply proven throughout, that Iraq is the embodiment of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Encouraging democracy in a country that is 60 percent Shiite, the U.S gave Iran everything it wanted, by way of the clerics who, all along, have had their own plan for Iraq. A fascinating chapter chronicles Engel’s meeting with a well-informed George Bush, who is comfortable saying we will need troops in Iraq for 40 years Whether describing IED attacks, kidnappings, or soldiers’ hardships—or pondering how to hold onto one’s humanity in hell—Engel writes with heartbreaking weariness. This is required reading for anyone who wants to know what’s really going on “over there.” --Ilene Cooper