And Then All Hell Broke Loose by Engel Richard

Author:Engel, Richard [Engel, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor & Entertainment, International & World Politics, Middle Eastern, Politics & Social Sciences, Middle East, Historical, Biographies & Memoirs, History & Theory, Politics, War, Journalists, Memoirs, Biography, History, Professionals & Academics, Relations, Political Science, Politics & Government
ISBN: 9781451635133
Amazon: 1451635133
Barnesnoble: 1451635133
Goodreads: 26586357
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Published: 2016-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

SIX

I TURNED THIRTY-THREE SHORTLY AFTER I began settling down in Beirut after the month-long Lebanon war. I was fulfilling my ambition, covering the biggest story of my generation, and I was being rewarded with praise and promotions from my bosses at NBC. But I sure wasn’t living a normal life.

For years I had frenetically covered the fighting in Iraq, spending six or eight weeks in the war zone, then pulling out for a couple of weeks of R & R at a hotel in Thailand or Italy, then returning to the nerve-jangling violence of Baghdad. Then when I finally got the go-ahead to set up a bureau in Beirut—which I thought would bring a modicum of stability to my life—the Israelis and Hezbollah started killing each other.

The shooting finally stopped on August 14, 2006, and I found the apartment of my dreams in Beirut on a small, historic street near the Albergo Hotel. Ironically the apartment had been vacated by an Italian diplomat during the fighting. Israel was bombing Hezbollah strongholds in south Beirut both from the air and from the sea and at times the fighting was getting close to the center of the city.

So now I had a place to call home. I started dating again and had a lively social life, unremarkable for a single guy my age unless you’re a single guy who had spent the past few years putting your mattress against hotel windows as a defense against car bombs.

I had a broader journalistic portfolio now, but Iraq was still at the center of the action. The triumphant US invasion had become a sectarian struggle that was far more savage and sinister and seemed to go on forever. To understand why, you have to go back to the debate over the American invasion. President Bush seemed obsessed with Iraq. He believed that if the United States got rid of Saddam Hussein and instituted democratic reforms, the Middle East—and the world—would be a safer and better place. He seemed to have no idea, however, how it would happen. The administration often used the analogy of planting the “seeds of democracy” in the Middle East, as if they’d sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn’t sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn’t enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many “seeds of terror” and “seeds of hope”), democracy is more like a fragile flower that requires constant attention and the right soil. Dictatorships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own.

The casus belli, of course, was Iraq’s purported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A secondary rationale was an alleged link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” Bush said on October 7, 2002, five months before the invasion.

I thought this was preposterous, as did most people familiar with the Middle East, but the supposed presence of WMDs made it a secondary concern.

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