the longer we're here

Anthony Shadid tells stories. He tells them so well, in fact, that he won the 2004 Pulitzer for International Reporting. He reports from Iraq for the Washington Post, and I saw him speak at Memorial Union in November after the release of his book Night Draws Near.

Night Draws Near is the story of Iraq’s people—their collective history as a nation, their culture, and their struggles since the American invasion. During his speech, Shadid told us about a few of the people he knew in Iraq, in particular a 15-year-old girl who wants to be a writer.

An hour after the speech, I ran out and got the book. (The speech was a pretty good advertisement, I must say.) I needed to read it because, well, I wanted to learn about Iraq, and I didn’t feel like I was getting enough from the newspapers.

Don’t get me wrong. The reporters in Iraq are doing a fine job. They put their lives in danger every day to report the war, and I’m grateful for that. I guess I just want more.

The reports I read are mostly numbers. Two soldiers killed in a helicopter crash. Forty dead after a suicide bombing. These are important numbers, of course, but what do they mean? Unless I saved every single newspaper clipping from every story I read, I would have no context for these figures. I would never know what life is like in Baghdad, or how these numbers have really affected our country and theirs.

It’s hard, when you’re a reporter, to get all this in a 20-inch story that’s due in a few hours. It took Anthony Shadid 448 pages and years of reporting and reflection to fit it all in. That failing is no one’s fault; it’s just the flaw of our medium. Because reporters are limited on time and space, and because they can only see what’s happening in one place, with one family or battalion at a time, the coverage is segmented and hard to understand.

When he won the Pulitzer for his reporting, Shadid addressed the Washington Post newsroom. He thanked his editors and sources, and then said something that I think sums up the challenge that reporters in Iraq face:

“The longer I’m here,” he said, “the less I understand the story.”

If he’s in the middle of it all, and he doesn’t understand it, how are we supposed to when we’re thousands of miles away?

The role of reporters in the Iraq war is to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense at all; to give context to a war that is being fought before their eyes; to give us the not just the numbers, but also the stories. That’s hard when no one understands it, and it gets harder the longer we’re there.

I don’t think anyone will understand this war for many, many years—after the last shots are fired, the newspapers have been collected and the books written. Then, we can take a step back with the eyes of hindsight and analyze how it all happened and what it means. Until then, reporters will write the best they can with what they see; we’ll try to make sense of it back home with whatever news they give us.