AND THEN ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE
Two Decades in the Middle East
Richard Engel
Simon & Schuster
241 pages; Rs 699
When Richard Engel was 13, traveling abroad with his parents, he dreamed of becoming a reporter. He imagined working at the old International Herald Tribune and living in an apartment in Paris, overlooking the Champs-Élysees. He saw himself wearing white suits and brandishing a bone cigarette holder, and "writing dispatches about intrigues and politics and spies and damsels and all the rest."
He did grow up to become a reporter - he is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC - but would spend much of his 20-year award-winning career not in glamorous Paris, but in war zones in West Asia. As an enterprising freelance reporter, unable to get a visa to travel to Iraq but determined to cover the war, he got himself into the country by volunteering as a "human shield" for a peace organisation in 2003, and struck a deal with ABC News; he would become the last American television reporter left in Baghdad.
In 2005, his Baghdad hotel was rocked by a truck bomb across the street, and as the region exploded into war and revolution, he would have other close calls - including being kidnapped in Syria in 2012 - that he says would leave him with "fingerprints" of post-traumatic stress.
Mr Engel's harrowing adventures make for gripping reading in his new book and he deftly uses them as a portal to look at how West Asia has changed since he arrived in the region as a young reporter in 1996. The result is a book that gives readers a brisk but wide-angled understanding of the calamities that have unfurled there over the past two decades - most notably, the consequences of the United States invasion of Iraq, and the sad trajectories of revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Syria, which began in hope and snowballed into fiasco. Countless articles and books have chronicled these events - with a narrower focus and more detail - but for readers looking for an astute, fast-paced overview, this book is a great explainer.
Some of his observations have a comic edge: He describes hiring staff in Baghdad before the bombing began ("an avaricious driver and a drunkard cop") as assembling "the cast of characters for an updated version of Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop.'" But more often, there is a surreal horror to his descriptions: the sight of 11 bodies of small boys, perhaps ages eight to 10, killed in Qana, Lebanon, during an Israeli air raid in 2006; the memory of "a stray dog carrying a severed human head between its teeth" in Iraq; a heartbreaking interview with a 14-year-old boy who had a hand and foot chopped off by Islamic State thugs because he refused to cooperate.
Along the way, Mr Engel also offers his personal impressions of leaders. He recalls that Saddam Hussein had "a terrifying gaze" (even in a courtroom, facing a death sentence), that Muammar el-Qaddafi seemed like "a washed-up, strung-out rock star," and that Hosni Mubarak had become "an old fool" surrounded by "generals in tight uniforms and civilian advisers in bad suits."
What makes Mr Engel's tactile eyewitness accounts valuable is that they are fuel-injected with his knowledge of the history and politics of the region. His analysis is so acute that the reader wishes the book had been more expansive.
He places events he covered in context with the tangled history of West Asia: its centuries-old clash with the West, and the fallout that the arbitrary borders drawn by the European powers after World War I would have on the nation-states carved out of the Ottoman Empire. He provides a succinct account of how George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq - without a legitimate casus belli - opened a Pandora's box of tragedy and mayhem.
Hussein was the first of what Mr Engel calls West Asia's "big men" to fall; Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak and Qaddafi would soon follow, as the Arab Spring swept like a wildfire from country to country. By invading and ineptly occupying Iraq, Mr Engel writes, the Bush administration "broke the status quo that had existed since 1967" in the region. And Barack Obama, "elected by a public opposed to more adventurism" there, "broke the status quo even further through inconsistent action" - encouraging uprisings in the name of democracy in Egypt, supporting rebels with force in Libya, and wavering on Syria.
In recounting these, Mr Engel pauses now and then to speculate about an assortment of what-ifs. Whether the reader agrees with all his assessments, they are rooted in his understanding of the region and are never less than compelling. Though he rebukes the Obama administration for sending mixed signals, he argues that military intervention in Syria would have probably turned into another quagmire. As for the future of the region, he predicts that "new dictators will offer themselves as an alternative to the horrors of ISIS."
It is a grim vision of the future. These new dictators, Mr Engel suggests, "will likely be worse than the old strongmen because they'll be able to use new technologies to identify and hunt down their enemies," and "they will have the ability to point to the ugliness of recent history as a justification for taking their citizens' rights."
©2016 The New York Times News
