Books: The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq by Christian Parenti

The price of 'freedom'

By John Ziebell

The noblest form of retribution, Marcus Aurelius said, is to not become like one's enemy. That statement still rings true as a sort of warrior's substitute for "First, do no harm." And in terms of the current administration's war on Iraq, the phrase that should most make us reconsider our nation's path is one that surfaces with alarming frequency in Christian Parenti's commentary from the occupied front: "Things were better under Saddam."

The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq embraces a tradition of war reportage that begins by resisting the media status quo, blending the analysis of William Shirer's Berlin Diary with the blunt gallows honesty of Michael Herr's Dispatches. Some of this work has appeared in The Nation, but when collected becomes greater than the sum of its parts; while a book sacrifices some level of immediacy to privileged reflection, that's something we could all use a lot more of these days. Looking at recent news--wholesale executions of Iraqis by Iraqis, the disappearance of tons of explosives under American supervision, DOD calls for investigations into illegal contract awards to Halliburton--there's not a conservative pundit working who's going to have anywhere near the "I told you so" cred that Parenti earned before his book even hit the streets.

And he's not only right, he's readable. The biggest problem with television is that so many of us, though we know better, confuse what it passes off as news with reality. Parenti is here to remind us of our sins, and he knows exactly which buttons to push in showing us why the written word still matters. He has an eye for the perfect image, a wonderful ear for dialogue and a prose style that floats across the page. He consistently conveys gut-level connections made with real people who are in the mix, and whether he's talking to aid workers or SAW gunners or dissemblers of media disinformation, we instinctively realize we're plugged into a parallel universe, and that the truth of that world is a whole lot different than Dan Rather's.

In a way, it's a shame this book couldn't have come out three months before the election; while Parenti never directly attacks George Bush, the sordid tales he relates should make an estimated half the voting public reconsider the president's supervisory capabilities on Election Day. Parenti's personal bias may be political, but it's hard to fault straightforward arguments against greed, stupidity, incompetence and general incivility. He speaks for Iraqi noncombatants who are getting the short end of the stick, and speaks to the armed resistance fighters who actively oppose our presence, but he's also an uncompromising voice supporting the American grunts and company-grade officers who are tasked with implementing unsound and even absurd agendas dreamed up by White House insiders who watch their mistakes unfold every night at home on TV.

Things were better before the Freedom. It's an easy sentiment to understand in a once-advanced nation that has become "modernity's junkyard," with 60 percent unemployment, no power, no water and no police, run ineptly by a pack of youthful Bush administration delegates who rotate in and out of Baghdad's isolated Green Zone--Saddam's former palace--a "policy wonk's Disneyland in the center of hell." Setting aside the issue that actual lives are at stake, which politicians and their staffers can do quite adroitly, the situation in Iraq--petty venalities carried out on a billion-dollar scale--simply can't be discussed without irony.

The Freedom is a powerful work, and while the narrative architecture seems a bit chaotic, it's arguably impossible to impose too much order on dispatches that mirror chaos at its contemporary acme. Parenti also rubs up against a form of journalistic hubris to which war reportage seems particularly prone: the affected feel invoked when insightful writers adopt disingenuous airs to beatify colleagues, and by implication themselves, as nonconformist rogues risking their lives for The Truth. In the end, however, the strength of Parenti's language, not to mention its message, far outweighs the minor imperfections.