ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 3/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
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 centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side
1920 BAGHDAD
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the |
| 0:05.0 | CBS I and the world. I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:08.0 | A Stranger in Your Own City, |
| 0:10.0 | Aeth, Abdullah Had's new book, |
| 0:12.0 | travels in the Middle East long war. This is the Iraq war, before and |
| 0:16.0 | after the American present. It is now 2003, 2004. Our protagonist, |
| 0:22.8 | Hoorayth, is a journalist, a photojournalist, he has a camera, |
| 0:27.5 | he's attached to journalism, English language journalism |
| 0:30.5 | coming out of Iraq, he's acted as a translator, but it is now very much a war as observed |
| 0:36.4 | by a keen member of the Baghdad city. |
| 0:41.6 | In other words, this is a Baghdad resident who sees his own city transforming |
| 0:46.6 | itself with American presence after the war, the looting after the war, the great relief people concerned about the future |
| 0:54.7 | the lack of American preparation the blunder of dismissing the army the blunder of |
| 1:02.3 | driving out the bath party so there was no of I'm keen on this great because it's a story that we see repeated again and again |
| 1:14.9 | through history when the exiles come back it's as if they are frozen in time they |
| 1:19.6 | remember a city they left what did it mean mean for Iraq that the exiles rushed back in many of |
| 1:25.6 | them would become leaders in the American version of Iraqi governance? |
| 1:32.0 | John this is a very, very accurate description. |
| 1:35.0 | It's people who went back to a city |
| 1:38.0 | and they were frozen in time. |
| 1:40.0 | So when they left it out some of the 50s, some 60s, others in the 60s, others in 70s. They lived in exile in cocoons of paranoia because the regime was hunting them and the Iraq they took with them was very different from the Iraq that they came back to. |
| 1:56.0 | That Iraq they came back to had suffered under the regime for 20, 30 years, had lived through the sanctions. |
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