Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War [Paperback]

Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

This has not been an easy read, and i mean that in the most complimentary sense possible. Frankly, it's been almost a relief to reach the end of it. Like the author, who after six years covering wars overt & covert in the ME, is quite simply shattered and must take a posting elsewhere, this reader was left in a much-reduced state: the standard despairing sympathy that we all have to feel for the humble, voiceless victims who suffer the bombs & bullets, mixed with deepest distaste for atrophied aspects of the age-old culture that retains its grip on hearts & minds there. And not least, of course, you're left aghast still at the diabolical consequences of the hubristic policy of western leaderships.
In saying that, though, I have to admit it: there's a voyeuristic fascination in following such acute & sensitive first-hand witness of life under tyranny & in the teeth of hi-tech war right across this notoriously immovable quagmire among the cesspools & deadlocks of our time. Today's churning mile-a-minute media consistently gives us too little insight into real lives, and certainly in this short (250-page) book Megan Stack does cover a lot of ground, across a wide region & over half a decade. Therefore - alive to today's attention spans, no doubt - she doesn't attempt overmuch analysis (though when she does, to me she gets it spot on), giving us instead, with befitting modesty, a series of imagistic accounts, sketches & vignettes of ground-level encounters, shot through with the kind of perceptiveness & sensibility that proves the Aristotelian dictum about Poetry being closer to truth than History. Some might question whether aesthetic language is justified in proximity to prosaic human tragedy, others will reply that only this degree of sensibility can convey with lasting immediacy the unscreenable horror here encountered & reported with such courage. I hesitate to say this kind of emotionally potent, sharp-edged imagery has anything to do with her being a woman, but somehow I can't imagine or recall male correspondents achieving a pitch that so perfectly blends diamond-hard aperçus on socio-political context, with such compassionate insight into the heartbreaking impacts on ordinary lives.
More than simply reporting, Stack's writing is art in the service of cause: it's a formidably moving assertion of the primacy of the commons, and by that token, an indictment of the vile indifference of power in the face of the immiseration of this distressed region's distraught commons. If you only ever follow the MidEast through headlines, this work will take you directly into the 'backstories' of local-level misery, hope, heroism, despair. (Caution: Unless you have a heart of stone, you'll need a strong stomach). As her subtitle has it, this is "an education in war" - for we the sofa-bound, from an extraordinary woman who was right in at the frontlines. I would think it well deserves acclaim from experts as one of the definitive works of reportage on the region's recent history - an inverse periscope that has probed undaunted beyond standard paycheque/ embedded journalism's leaky skiff, in an age so much at sea in these gales of "extremism" blowing from both Old and New Worlds.

The ability to see. And then to report what is truly seen, without the eyes being averted due to "editorial concerns." Can it be taught in journalism school, or is it an innate moral compass one is born with?

Initially I was skeptical of this book; the title is a bit off-putting (that was before I learned that it refers to one of world's oldest logic problems; and has ample applications to all involved in the so-called war on terror). And then it was written by a journalist, a woman at that, who was unfamiliar with war when she started. Enough reasons for some justified unease. Fortunately a good friend recommended it; he even wanted to check out the validity of certain portions of the book, those on Saudi Arabia, with me. And so when it popped up on my Vine Newsletter, I had to say: "Yes, please." The best decision I made the entire week.

Megan K. Stack is a remarkable person. She had been in Paris on September 11, 2001; soon thereafter she was on the Afghanistan - Pakistan frontier, reporting on the hunt for Bin Laden. She appears to have come to the so-called "War on Terror" unencumbered by theoretical models of the Islamic world formulated in America's various think-tanks and university "Middle East Studies Centers." She espoused none of the theories of the fictional "York Harding," as described in Graham Greene's The Quiet American: Centenary Celebration 2004. Her assignments thereafter carry her to Israel, Iraq, Libya, "Kurdistan," Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt. When she gets "shut out," meaning that she really cannot cut through the government-imposed barriers on journalists, like in the Yemen, she says so. Thought her portrait of the madness in Qaddafi's Libya was on target. In Israel she learns that you cannot call Israelis from Morocco and Yemen "Jewish Arabs." She also commits the ultimate faux pas: "You humanized them. You're writing about suicide bombers as people who have corpses and families. They can't stand to see them written about like that." In Saudi Arabia I saw only one error; it was in assessment and judgment, understandably enough given her brief time in the Kingdom. She is yelled at by two guards for standing in front of the bank; told to go away because men might see her. Stack says: "Leave me alone!" And then she says: "This was a slip. In a land ruled by male ego, yelling at a man only deepens the crisis." Au contraire. In this situation, 98% of the time, the correct response is yelling loud and hard. The chauvinistic men don't know what to do, and slink off. My wife did it several times.

It is Iraq and Lebanon that are the essential core of the book, and she tells the story with a rising, Bolero-esque style; certainly not of pleasure, but of horror. The murder of the young female Iraqi journalist, Atwar Bahjat is particularly heart-rending. Call it what you may, incredible courage, sheer insanity, the ultimate in journalistic duty, but the climatic part of the book is in South Lebanon, where Stack raced, as the bombs fell around her from Israeli planes. Fittingly, in the madness around her, she visits a hospital for the mentally ill; and ponders the classic question: Are the people on the inside, or the outside, the ones who are the crazier? Stack HAD to document the horror done to civilians from the bombs dropped by planes; for as she said, she was drowning in shame. She knew that the bombs that had caused a tiny baby girl to be badly burned, and placed in a Tyre emergency room had come from, and been paid for, by Americans

Another female journalist with long-term experience in the Middle East, Robin Wright, also wrote a book Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East on her experiences. I gave Ms. Wright's book a 3-star review; comparisons between the books are instructive. Wright's experience is longer; but, as she says, in October, 2006, she was on her fourth trip to Iraq with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Close association with power caused her to lose some of her ability to see, so it is no surprise that Abu Ghraib is never mentioned in her book, yet is a salient point in Stack's; the disillusionment of a young Jordanian women was the perfect vehicle to convey what Abu Ghraib represented to the Arab people. Both journalists covered the rigged election in the town of Damanhour, in Egypt, between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Gamal Heshmat, and the government-sponsored candidate, Moustafa Fiqi, who "won." Stack was there, and interviewed the principals through interpreters. Wright reported from a secondary source, Noha al Zeiny, who told her what she needed to know.

I've also read (and reviewed) Dexter Filkins' The Forever War (Vintage), Sebastian Junger's War and Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. Each of the books is strong, written by journalists who are generally thorough; at least two have clearly "paid their dues" in terms of being where the bullets were flying. Each book is a worthwhile read. Nonetheless, I felt that Junger practiced some self-censorship; Coll's book is almost perfect, factually, yet even he makes a major mistake in describing the terrorist attacks against upscale compounds in Riyadh in 2003. I didn't find any of these flaws in Stack's work.

In 1994 I traveled for six days with one of the "big-name" journalist from the Vietnam War era. Serendipity had brought us together; both on our first return visits to Vietnam since the war. We had our agreements, and our (civil) disagreements, about the wars of the past, and the ones to come. Murray Fromson shared with me an experience from the very final days of the American war in Vietnam; he was still working in the Saigon bureau a few days before the fall of the city. The report came in that a C-5A Galaxy had crashed just after takeoff from Tan Son Nhut. He was the first on the scene, and reported the devastation; the babies and small children, the orphans of the war who were being evacuated, and now lay, scattered across the fields, dead. He cried while reporting the story, and almost 20 years later, he was still deeply rankled that he had been upbraided by the "brass" of CBS in NYC for being "unprofessional." After seeing the devastation of South Lebanon; the impact, particularly on the old, the crazies, and the babies who suffered under the bombs, Megan Stack also cried. We need more such "unprofessional" journalists; those who can see, and be moved by it; who know that nothing justifies such suffering. Ms. Stack has performed the essential journalist function: she has helped us all to see, if we are willing. An important, 5 ½ star book that should be read in all our schools, but particularly in the think tanks that construct the reasons why all of this is justified by America's `security needs.'

A final piece of gratuitous advice that I hope finds its way to Ms. Stack: You've paid your dues; never let the siren song of the adrenalin rush of war call you back. You've done enough to help the rest of us see; go peacefully among the many countries that still have a tenuous hold on that marvelous state.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on July 16, 2010)

Megan Stack is a journalist, in my own opinion a superlative journalist. Following the 9/11 attacks she was detailed to cover the various situations in the Middle East and wherever we are to locate Afghanistan. She was in her 20's, younger (she tells us) than she realised, and `extremely American'. She disclaims any strong convictions, stating that as a journalist she only `wanted to see'. Well, she has the eyes to see with, she has seen with them, and she has the skill to let us see via them. She does not like any of what she sees, and small wonder. However this set of reports is no kind of tract. She takes us with her to Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and we accompany her in her attempts to make what sense can be made of it.

Mr Rumsfeld once said with admirable clarity that policy analysis had to be based on the known knowns and the known unknowns. There are known to be unknown unknowns, but apart from knowing that much, we can't in the nature of the case feature these in our decisions. Fair enough, but knowing is one thing, and understanding is something else entirely. There are ways of failing to understand plain facts that are looking us in the eye, and they stem from prejudice, patriotism and preconception. There is also often a challenge in trying to make sense of the plain facts, and that, similarly, requires a mind that is not pre-programmed. Megan Stack has the right kind of mind, and at the very beginning and near the end of her book she summarises one of her overall conclusions. The version of this in her prologue is, perhaps, slightly startling. Says she `the war on terror never really existed. It was not a real thing...it was essentially nothing but a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests, all overhung with the unassailable memory of falling skyscrapers.'

`Not a real thing' indeed? Professor Bobbitt, where are you now with your long and scholarly Terror and Consent? I can go along with Megan Stack to the extent that the war on terror was more a slogan than a policy, and that to the extent that it was a policy it was a hopelessly incoherent jumble. Whether you agree with me, or with her, or with neither of us, it is undoubtedly the case that the Bush administration in its latter days was resorting less and less to the expression `war on terror', this point made by Bobbitt among others. Whether or not I can go along with Stack's conclusion, I am certainly compelled by her narratives to say to myself `A war on terror sounds fine, but what exactly is it? What are we fighting? Whom are we fighting?' Al Qaeda are at least a known entity, however elusive, but to say the least they are not the whole story.

Do you remember Mr Bush's great objective of turning Iraq into a shining city of democracy on a hill, the emanations of which would pervade the region and set it alight with the inspiring Jeffersonian gospel of Demoxy an' Freem? If that kind of thing still retains any resonance for you try Ms Stack's accounts of elections in Egypt, women's conditions in Saudi Arabia and the startlingly different levels of moral fervour in American dealings with brutal personal dictatorship in Iraq on the one hand and Libya on the other. To me, it is all a story of the Unknown Knowns. American policy found a way of not knowing what was staring it in the face because it had mesmerised itself with slogans and formulas that prevented it from knowing all that.

One clear lesson from this account, for me at least, is the simple nostrum that if you believe that the world is all aspiring to American-style democracy or that, in the words of Dr Rice to the British ambassador, `American ideas are universal' then, bluntly, they ain't. Americans need a reality check, something being strenuously fought against by the current crop of ultra-patriots, in their own view of themselves at least. Megan Stack says it better `America dreaming its deep sweet dream, there and not there. America chasing phantoms, running uphill to nowhere in pursuit of a receding mirage'. America turns out some great journalists.