AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND soldiers have published countless memoirs about their experiences in the Iraq War. But a new book by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provides a radically different perspective: that of an ordinary Iraqi who witnessed firsthand the decimation of his country.
“The occupation was bound to collapse and fail,” Abdul-Ahad writes of the U.S. invasion in his remarkable memoir, “A Stranger in My Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War.” As Abdul-Ahad goes on to explain, “A nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy.”