3/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 14, 2023 by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
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🗓️ 20 June 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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1902 Baghdad
3/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 14, 2023 by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq’s history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.
When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS, I Am The World. I'm John Bachelors. A stranger in your own city. I bill a |
| 0:11.5 | HODZ new book, Travels in the Middle East Long War. This is the Iraq War before and after |
| 0:16.9 | the American President. It is now 2003-2004. Our protagonist, Ray, is a journalist, a photo |
| 0:26.5 | journalist. He has a camera. He's attached to journalism, English language journalism, |
| 0:31.2 | coming out of Iraq. He's acted as a translator. But it is now very much a war as observed |
| 0:37.3 | by a keen member of the Baghdad city. In other words, this is a Baghdad resident who sees |
| 0:45.7 | his own city transforming itself with American presence after the war, the looting after |
| 0:53.2 | the war, the great relief people concerned about the future, the lack of American preparation, |
| 1:00.5 | the blunder of dismissing the army, the blunder of driving out the bath party so there was |
| 1:05.4 | no structure whatsoever. And the reentry of exiles. And I'm keen on this for eighth |
| 1:13.1 | because it's a story that we see repeated again and again through history. When the exiles |
| 1:17.8 | come back, it's as if they are frozen in time. They remember a city they left. What |
| 1:23.8 | did it mean for Iraq that the exiles rushed back in? Many of them would become leaders |
| 1:29.4 | in the American version of Iraqi governance. John, this is a very, very accurate description. |
| 1:37.8 | It's people who went back to a city and they were frozen in time. So when they left |
| 1:42.4 | Iraq some in the 50s, some 60s, others in the 70s, they lived in exile in cocoons of |
| 1:50.1 | paranoia because the regime was hunting them and the Iraqi they had took with them was |
| 1:54.8 | very different from the Iraq that they came back to. That Iraq they came back to hard, |
| 2:00.3 | suffered under the regime for 20, 30 years, had lived through the sanctions. I need to |
| 2:06.4 | cleave it between the exiles and the Iraqis cannot be more emphasized. Many of those exiles |
| 2:12.7 | were, you know, aligning themselves with Iran during the Iraq Iran war. And even for, I |
| 2:18.8 | think for most of the Iraqis they saw that as a treason if they were, and they were, |
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