On an ordinary street corner in the South Bronx stands a four-story, nineteenth-century brick house: the home and office of Michael Kamber, a former Times correspondent and one of the Iraq War’s best photographers, who lives on the top floor and not long ago converted the ground floor into a gallery called the Bronx Documentary Center. Kamber is also the editor of “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,” to be published in May by the University of Texas Press—a monumental, eloquent, and devastating compilation of spoken testimony by photographers who covered the war over many years, along with their searing and, in some cases, never-before-published pictures, and a beautiful foreword by Dexter Filkins. This book will be one of the essential documents to come out of the Iraq War. “At the very least,” Kamber writes, “there should be a record of what happened.”
For the next month, Kamber’s center hosts a new exhibit called “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” which opened last week, just in time for the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the war. The main feature of the exhibit is a wall of poster-size blowups of pages from the diary of First Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin, a former U.S. Marine who commanded a tank in the battalion that was at the tip of the invasion force all the way to Baghdad, and who was on hand when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Firdos Square, on April 9, 2003. One page describes the chaos of that scene, with troops, reporters, Iraqi civilians, and Western “human shields” all crowded together and shouting at one another, no one having a clue what to do next. Another page lists “Total Kills”—“70 People Dead”—broken down by type, including Iraqi R.P.G. teams (six), people in compounds (three), and troops (twenty-eight). There are snapshots taken by McLaughlin, as well as his mementos from the war—a strand of yellow worry beads given to him by an Iraqi man; his post-service psychiatric report from 2011: “We discussed his current symptoms which include anxiety in family social situations, irritability, numbness and lack of empathy. He continues to have intermittent nightmares and he continues to have jerking movements in his sleep. The patient denies mania or psychosis, panic attacks, obsessions, or compulsions.”
McLaughlin—who is now a lawyer in Boston, and was on hand for the opening in the Bronx last week—wrote in a short essay, “I take prescription medicine to sleep at night. The Department of Veterans Affairs says I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t have a disorder. It’s a natural reaction. It would be a disorder if I was unaffected.”
Finally, there are photographs by Gary Knight, who covered the invasion on assignment for Newsweek, and selections from the reportage (including a reconstruction of the events in Firdos Square, published in The New Yorker) of Peter Maass—two journalists who were with McLaughlin’s platoon that day, and who organized the exhibit.
Anniversaries are uneasy things. They seldom correspond to a spontaneous state of mind, yet they call for an emotional response, and the required effort can leave you unsettled and dissatisfied. Looking at Lieutenant McLaughlin’s Iraq tokens arranged in an exhibit case, I had the sense that it was too soon to see the war through museum glass. At the same time, random pieces of the show brought back the early months of the war with astonishing vividness. A map the Marine drew in his diary of the area around Firdos Square shows a diagram of a shabby little hotel where I used to go for coffee, and that I haven’t thought of in years.
The week of the invasion, I was in Ivory Coast, on assignment for this magazine to report on a civil war. In fact, I was travelling through rebel-held territory near the Liberian border with Mike Kamber, whom I had just met, and with whom I spent many hours driving over dirt roads through hair-raising checkpoints guarded by drunk or stoned or just zoned-out teen-agers with Kalashnikovs. But we kept discussing the other war, the one that the rest of the world was waiting for. I think we both were anxious to finish up our reporting in West Africa and head to the Middle East. An overwhelming tide of history was about to wash over Iraq.
The decade between that fateful week and the present moment has telescoped, compressed down to a single, terrible judgment: the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris, a historic folly that took the American eye off Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while shattering Iraq into a million bloody pieces. When the last American troops departed a little over a year ago, there was no sense on this side of triumph or satisfaction--nothing but sadness and relief. Iraq, meanwhile, remains a dramatically violent country. Its politics are oriented toward Iran and the broader Shiite side of a looming regional war. After two trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, there is so little U.S. influence that we can’t get the government of Iraq to interdict Iranian weapons shipped across its territory to arm the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iraq has rejected the organ transplant and gone its own way. I imagine that there are far fewer American traces left in Baghdad than there were in Saigon after 1975.
It’s a severe judgment, and convincing. Yet it misses something about the intervening years.
For most of the foreigners I met during the four years I was travelling in Iraq—journalists like the ones in Kamber’s book, soldiers and Marines like the ones in the Bronx exhibit, civilian officials and aid workers—as well as for many, many Iraqis, March 19, 2003, was already history. The trigger had been pulled, the regime had fallen, and the Americans were an unavoidable and unalterable fact on the ground. Should America have gone to war? It didn’t come up very much. The all-consuming concern was the violent, multifaceted present--and, more dimly, the outlines of the future, which was already looking pretty grim the first summer after the invasion, though few people seemed ready to say it was over. It couldn’t be over, it had hardly begun; it was happening, every day, and a lot was riding on the outcome. You couldn’t roll back history. So people in Iraq talked obsessively about the bombing in Najaf, the latest statement from Muqtada al-Sadr, the latest directive from the Green Zone, which roads in Babil were no longer safe, how many hours of electricity they had in Adhamiya, and how it was all going to turn out.
The war continually posed a physical, intellectual, and moral challenge. As Filkins writes, “Every day was different—yesterday the distant past, tomorrow a tunnel of darkness… Iraq in those years was a bloody kaleidoscope: turning, twisting, rearranging itself like so many pieces of broken glass.” There was hardly room in your head for each day’s killings and political maneuverings, let alone the missing weapons of mass destruction, which fell out of discussion over the course of that first year, let alone African uranium and the State of the Union.
That was why each return to the U.S. brought a mental jolt. As the war got worse, people at home—if they were talking about Iraq at all—were arguing more and more about false intelligence and official deceptions, Karl Rove and Valerie Plame. The history of the war had already taken place before March 19, 2003—that was when it ended, not when it began. Everything since then—that is, the real war—was bracketed and, somehow, dismissed because of that original sin. Or, if you were a defender of the Bush Administration, everything since the invasion was flattened out into a simple case of stuff happening and freedom being born, in spite of the best efforts of the press to make it look like a debacle. So the experience in Iraq and the debate at home took drastically different paths.
Over time my interest in the place came down to the people I met, and as Iraqis whom I knew became engulfed in horror, I wanted it to be mitigated and the worst averted. That meant wanting America to succeed, or at least not completely fail—whatever that might be. Though I knew that the whole effort was very likely doomed, it was emotionally impossible to write it off. Even foreigners who had nothing but contempt for American officials and officers couldn’t bring themselves to that point. The only alternatives were Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite extremists. The stupidities of American policy, the mistakes and—in some cases—crimes of American forces, made it harder and harder to sustain this attitude, but if you turned completely against the U.S., you were consigning a lot of people you knew to a terrible fate. It became their fate anyway—that was the real tragedy for Iraqis.
By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it. Today, I’m not close to anyone who’s still there.
What I’m describing is a weak vantage point for thinking historically. Spending a lot of time in Iraq did not make you more keenly aware of America’s larger strategic interests. It rendered you less likely to ask the essential questions about the inception of the war. It was in some ways a narrow, blinkered position. People who had no personal connection to Iraq, however well- or ill-informed, were readier to think that it was all inevitable—that the past decade was a footnote to the main event—that the tenth anniversary of the war would look exactly like this.
Photograph by Gary Knight/VII.