This is CBS, I Am The World. I'm John Bachelors. A stranger in your own city.

I Bill Ahad's new book travels in the Middle East long war. This is the Iraq war before

and after the American president. It is now 2003-2004. Our protagonist, Ray, is a journalist,

a photojournalist. He has a camera. He's attached to journalism, English language journalism

coming out of Iraq. He's acted as a translator, but it is now very much a war as observed

by a keen member of the Baghdad city. In other words, this is a Baghdad resident who sees

his own city transforming itself with American presence after the war, the looting after

the war, the great relief people concerned about the future, the lack of American preparation,

the blunder of dismissing the army, the blunder of driving out the bath party so there was

no structure whatsoever, and the reentry of exiles. I'm keen on this for eighth because

it's a story that we see repeated again and again through history. When the exiles come

back, it's as if they are frozen in time. They remember a city they left. What did it

mean for Iraq that the exiles rushed back in? Many of them would become leaders in the

American version of Iraqi governance. John, this is a very, very accurate description.

It's people who went back to a city and they were frozen in time. So when they left

Iraq some in the 50s, some in the 60s, others in the 70s, they lived in exile in cocoons

of paranoia because the regime was hunting them and the Iraq they had took with them was

very different from the Iraq that they came back to. That Iraq they came back to had suffered

under the regime for 20, 30 years, had lived through the sanctions. I need to cleave it between

the exiles and the Iraqis cannot be more emphasized. Many of those exiles were, you know,

aligning themselves with Iran during the Iraq Iran war. And even for, I think for most

of the Iraqis, they saw that as a treason and they were, some of them were taking part

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