The Forever War

"This is a completely different type of book. It is Dexter Filkins’s remarkable first-hand on-the-ground account of post 2003 in Iraq. The thing I love about Filkins’s reportage is that it is an extremely closely observed and beautifully written account from the frontline of the civil wars that rocked Iraq following the American-led war. From the little vignettes which the book is made up of you get a very clear picture of what people were like. These accounts were personally witnessed, often at great danger to himself, by Filkins who was a reporter for The New York Times , and they expose all the different contradictions which my other four books have mentioned. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So you find Sunni members of a given Iraqi tribe who join the insurgency and join al Qaeda, essentially. They are Iraqi members who are against the American-led occupation. But then, when a Shi’ite uncle of one of the Sunni insurgents is killed by non-Iraqi al Qaeda members, the Iraqi insurgence turns against al Qaeda. To understand the original roots of that particular story, of course, you have to go way back and look at the history leading up to it, to, for instance, the book by Nakash on the formation of Iraqi Shi’ism. It is so complicated and nothing is ever as simple as media accounts want us to believe. Iraq is a country with a particularly violent history of formation. In this book you capture a flavour of some of the human complexity that history left behind. Iraq’s future is still very uncertain; it is a fragile country, hanging on to hope by its fingernails. I worry a great deal. The terrible legacy of the past, the accumulated pain, and the politics of victimhood that arose post-2003 – these are destructive forces which have not played themselves out yet in spite of the recent elections. We have seen them playing themselves out in the politics of the new Iraqi elite which has formed. But, we also see a population which is evolving in very interesting ways. I don’t think anyone can predict what will happen in Iraq say in five years from now. One can but hope for the best. Perhaps Iraq’s biggest problem is the very poor quality of the élite who have assumed power since 2003. So I do worry about the future of Iraq."