Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, spoke at the Watson Institute Friday afternoon on the current state of Iraq and the roles and responsibilities of American journalists in the region
Shadid, Islamic affairs correspondent for the Washington Post, is often praised for humanizing Middle Eastern conflicts by focusing on detailed portraits of individuals and their families.
"There's no way around reading Anthony Shadid if you want to understand what's going on in Iraq," said Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Elliott Colla in introducing the lecture titled "Iraq's Tragedy: The Inevitability of Unintended Consequences."
Such comprehensive reporting is particularly crucial in a time when most embedded reporters "have never cracked (open) a textbook on the region," Colla added.
In addition to working with the Associated Press in Cairo and Los Angeles, Shadid has written for the Boston Globe in Washington, D.C. Since 2001, however, he has worked for the Post, reporting from Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. He was stationed in southern Lebanon this summer and is currently based in the country's capital, Beirut.
Shadid explained the difficulties of depicting war, as articles can become "redundant, repetitive and meaningless." Shadid said he tries to use war as a backdrop against which stories of individual lives can be told.
The relationship between parents and children is a common theme in his articles. "These universal stories ... these are the things we understand," he said.
While reporting overseas, Shadid said he formed several close relationships with Iraqi citizens. One was with Wamidh Nadhme, a professor who taught political science at Baghdad University. A Sunni Muslim, Nadhme knew Saddam Hussein personally from a series of brief encounters during his youth. According to a Post article Shadid wrote about the professor, Nadhme was the only person to visit Hussein when he had his tonsils removed at Cairo's Kasr al-Aini hospital in 1960.
"Perhaps this is one of the reasons Saddam did not cut off my head," Nadhme said in the article.
In another conversation, Shadid suggested that the situation in Iraq might be worse if the Americans withdrew. "What could be worse than this?" Nadhme replied, as the sounds of helicopters echoed over his house.
Shadid said his conversations with Nadhme spanned over three years, something he sees as remarkably rare in American journalism today. He added that it is becoming harder to have that kind of "time and access" to the Iraqi people.
Shadid also described his meetings with an Iraqi mother, emphasizing that it's "rare for male reporters to have access to female voices." With both a son and son-in-law in the national army, Shadid said the woman sold bubblegum in the street to help support her family.
Like many Iraqis, her life has been inundated with violence. Two car bombs have exploded in front of her home within the last few years, injuring her daughter and twin sister.
When asked during the question-and-answer session what he thinks the United States should do about the situation in Iraq, Shadid replied, "This is probably too simplistic, but I don't see what the American presence is achieving. It's doing more harm than good."
Shadid, who speaks Arabic and is the descendent of Lebanese immigrants, said he had mixed feelings when the statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down in Firdaus Square in 2003.
From a journalist's perspective, he said he was relieved, since he knew the incident represented the "end of dictatorship." As an Arab-American, Shadid said he felt almost conquered. Yet as an American citizen, Shadid said he was in awe of the United States' power.
"We now controlled Iraq's history," he said. "We controlled its fate, and yet we understood so little about it."
He went on to say that the more time he spends in Iraq, the less he understands it. "Civil war was too easy a term, too tidy to describe what I was seeing," he said, calling the conflict a mix of turf wars, insurgencies, sectarian killing and rampant political party militia attacks.
While speaking about the country's weak government and limited social services, Shadid was reminded of poster scraps he saw blowing around Baghdad. Their isolated phrases, "building the future" or "your voice," were meaningless and devoid of context - symbols of the country's directionless state, he said.
Shadid also expressed his frustration with the state of American journalism in the Middle East.
"The reporting is so politicized in the region," he said. "You can go over and over a word choice." He said most American newspapers embed reporters for only three to five years and blamed their lack of experience for the sweeping generalizations made about the region.
"Often, you spend the first 10 years of journalism learning the rules and the last 10 breaking them," he said.
In the future, Shadid said he believes events in the Middle East "will more often be covered by people living there," a method already common in British media. He also emphasized the need for multiple narratives in a story, something he said is surprisingly lacking in articles on Iraq.
While he was bleak about the current situation in Iraq, Shadid said improvements might come in the form of U.S. withdrawal and a long-term compromise between sectarian groups. Gestures such as Saddam Hussein's execution will probably have less of an effect, he said. Shadid said he was in Iraq on the day of Saddam's sentencing, adding that he believes the verdict was "not as meaningful" there as it was in the United States.
"The danger at this point with Saddam's execution is that the Sunnis will be more angry with the Shiites' reaction than with the execution itself," he said. Although these sectarian sentiments were incubating under Saddam's rule, it was the U.S. occupation that unleashed them, he added.
Shadid ended his lecture by responding positively to a question about the newly formed English-version of the Al-Jazeera network.
"There's going to be tension with Al-Jazeera International trying to be accepted by its English-speaking colleagues," he said, "But the more voices, the better out there."
