# Posted 1:46 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

DISPATCH FROM IRAQ: Nir Rosen is one of the fastest-rising stars among the ranks of foreign correspondents. He shipped out for Baghdad as a freelancer immediately after the invasion and quickly learned to speak Iraqi Arabic. Thus, he became the only American (that I know of, at least) to report extensively from inside insurgent-occupied Fallujah in 2004.

Nir's dispatch from Fallujah was given pride of place in the July 5, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, an accomplishment that immediately established his reputation as leading observer of occupied Iraq. A book contract soon followed. Earlier this month, the Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, published In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. In addition to various assignment for the The NYT Magazine and The Atlantic, Nir also has a major article on the cover of this morning's Outlook section in the WaPo.

Before getting to the substance of Nir's publications, I should warn you that I have been friends with Nir since elementary school. There is no question that I want him to succeed and I am proud to have OxBlog contribute to his success in whatever small way it can.

However, you don't need to worry at all that I will show any undeserved kindness to Nir's opinions, since I disagree with him vigorously about almost everything. He says the occupation is a manifest failure and wants to the bring the troops home now. To put it mildly, I think that's a bad idea.

But rather than rehashing that debate, let's talk about Nir's article in the WaPo. The first and last paragraphs of the articles summarize its message quite effectively:

Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of bodies, bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni or because they are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular torture device...

[The civil war] started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

The article doesn't mention any of Iraq's three elections or its new government, but suggests that they are irrelevant by focusing on the viciously sectarian nature of the police and armed forces:

The Mahdi militiamen were already back in force that morning, blocking off the roads and searching all who approached, wielding Iraqi police-issue Glock pistols and carrying Iraqi police-issue handcuffs. In Baghdad and most of Iraq, the police are the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army is the police. The same holds for the actual Iraqi army, posted throughout the country.

Although the overarching narrative here should be familiar to anyone who reads the newspapers, I think Nir is especially good at capturing details that bring the narrative to life, such as the police issue Glocks and handcuffs that found their way to the Mahdi army.

Of course, capturing such details is not the same as making a definitive case for the failure of the occupation. In that respect, I found the following passage from Nir's artilce to be quite revealing:

Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn't unite Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.

During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites' indifference.

If you happen to know Nir personally, you may recognize this passage as a veiled mea culpa. After returning from Fallujah in 2004, Nir was passionately persuaded that Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shi'ites would unite against the Christian, American occupation.

This was what Nir told me in Lombardi's Pizza in SoHo in the late summer of 2004. I mostly kept my disagreement to myself since Nir had the ultimate trump card to play: he was there and he saw it all for himself. I just read the newspapers, which actually supported his argument more than they supported mine.

Although there is no question that I am enjoying this little "I told you so", the real point here is that even those with unprecedented access to the facts on the ground in Iraq are profoundly influenced by their preconceived notions. Knowing Nir's politics, I couldn't help but infer that his observation of an emergent Sunni-Shi'ite alliance in 2004 reflected his desire for a united front against the American occupation.

Of course, I have made similar mistakes myself. Go through the OxBlog archives and see how long it took me to recognize just after the invasion that a full-scale insurgency was underway.

In the end, I don't think the outcome of the occupation will turn on who made more predictions that were right or wrong. It will turn on a few critical issues that are much more important than the rest: whether an elected government can hold together, whether the army can fight, and whether the police will enforce the law or function as sectarian militias and death squads.

Nir and others have made a strong case that the trend in each of these issue areas is running in the wrong direction. But I'm not throwing in the towel just yet, because even those with first-hand experience have been wrong before about the most important trends in Iraq. (33) opinions -- Add your opinion