Podcast • April 23, 2010

Anthony Shadid: Questions a Reporter Asks Himself

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Shadid. (60 minutes, 36 mb mp3) I find it almost painful to come to the States… I tell you, part of me is convinced that the legacy ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Shadid. (60 minutes, 36 mb mp3)

I find it almost painful to come to the States… I tell you, part of me is convinced that the legacy of this war is that Americans come away thinking we figured out how to win wars like this. If there’s a worse lesson you could take away from it, I’m willing to hear it, but I think it’s just spectacular that we don’t appreciate the devastation that has been wrought in Iraq over the past 7 or 8 years. It’s just spectacular. To my mind the society has been destroyed at some level. Is it going to turn out alright, in 10 years? Or 20 years? Or 30 years? You know, it may. It doesn’t feel that way to me right now. It feels as precarious, as dangerous, as unsettled as it ever has. In fact, it reminds me of 2003 in some ways. There was an incredible amount arrogance that went into this entire experience on the part of journalists, on the part of policy makers and the military. There wasn’t even a desire to learn. It does give you pause.

Anthony Shadid in conversation with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, April 22, 2010.

Anthony Shadid won his second Pulitzer Prize this spring for his unusual Washington Post pieces from Iraq — personal horror stories, most of them, about the war’s toxic effects on ordinary Iraqis. Underlying our conversation is an awkward question: was anybody reading him?

Shadid is a natural storyteller whose Oklahoma boyhood and Lebanese family roots add his own humanity to big-time journalism. He has an eye for gentle details of Arab social life. “Lunch for a stranger, any stranger, was requisite” is a typical Shadid aside in print. He is the rarity among American reporters in Iraq who lets himself and his readers feel the pain of plain Arabs.

“When you’re in Baghdad,” he says, “it’s almost overwhelming, the sense that this society has been broken… Everyone you meet there has lost a relative or a friend, every single person. When you think about the scope of the bloodshed, it’s breathtaking. The war is over, but it’s not over. It’s legacy is not over… We won’t know for a generation what we’ve done to Iraq, and that’s putting it optimistically.”

Anthony Shadid is in transit this Spring through Cambridge, Massachusetts where he and his wife Nada Bakri, also a Times correspondent, have just delivered their first child. Shadid is talking — fast! — here about the vicious circle of war; about the news industry’s role in exoticizing, then dehumanizing the Middle East; about his hero Ryszard Kapuscinski, who famously mixed fact and fiction; about Shadid’s own switch late last year from the Washington Post to the New York Times, for which he’ll be writing again soon from Baghdad. Will the Times indulge Anthony Shadid, and us, in his long, lingering village sagas? He worries a bit about being the last survivor of a golden age of foreign correspondence. Is there room for ambition in the newspaper game? Are the readers still there? He has the temerity to dismiss objectivity as an absurd standard in journalism. “I’ve always found it more interesting,” he says, “to imagine that I’m out there to answer a question I’ve been asking myself.”

September 15, 2005

Anthony Shadid on Iraq

It’s only now, looking back on some of our shows from the last few months, that I can see an Iraq mini-series of sorts that should have been obvious for a while: smart talkers who, ...

It’s only now, looking back on some of our shows from the last few months, that I can see an Iraq mini-series of sorts that should have been obvious for a while: smart talkers who, one at a time, have helped us understand what’s going on in the bewildering, occupied country thousands of miles away.

First was Kanan Makiya — the only Iraqi in the series, interestingly enough — who wouldn’t let us forget the horrors of Saddam’s regime and was still making a passionate case for the war as humanitarian intervention. Then came Juan Cole, the academic, historian, and blog aggregator extraodinaire. Last week was John Burns, the veteran war reporter with a breadth and vision that helped us glimpse, if only for an hour, the past, present, and possible (and terrifying) future of Iraq.

Now we welcome Anthony Shadid, the Pullitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post (and, before that, the Boston Globe). It’s his turn get us past the screaming headlines — the numbing numbers of new dead or the fitful constitutional process — and to focus our attention on the war and the country as he sees it. We’re turning to him for a lot, but taking our cue from his new book, which has at its beating heart a mosaic of human stories from Iraq: not generalizations, not caricatures, but real people.

Anthony Shadid

Washington Post reporter

Author of Night Draws Near

[In a studio in Oklahoma City, OK]