Interview With Karl Zinsmeister (Zinsmeister's first-hand report on our progress in Iraq)

RCP: Let’s set the stage for people who may not be familiar with the book. You were embedded with U.S. troops during the invasion of 2003. You chronicled that experience in the book “Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq.” And then you went back to Iraq again early this year for another look, sort of a close up look at the insurgency and the reconstruction process. And that’s your current book, “Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq.”

Zinsmeister: That’s right. One of the little things that matters is that I’m really not a hotel style reporter, I’m kind of a backpack reporter. One of the complaints you hear a lot from the soldiers is that the reporters aren’t around for extended periods of time. Days and days and days go by and they don’t see a reporter, and then something catches on fire and the reporters blow in in their SUVs with their translators and their drivers and they’re there for two hours and then they’re gone.

That's a good way of covering that item on fire, but it’s a poor way of getting a sense of the kind of rhythm of the life of these soldiers who are both policing and reconstructing Iraq. You miss a lot of the slower, deeper, more glacial kind of stories.

So the fact that I actually go and live with these soldiers, eat with them, camp out with them and go wherever they go on a daily basis for five or six weeks is perhaps one of the reasons I’m coming to different conclusions than a lot of the other reporters and why the book might be different than what you see on the nightly TV.

RCP: You said that your first book, Boots on the Ground, basically wrote itself. Did you always plan on going back and writing a follow up account or is that something that just sort of happened and if so, when did you decide to go back and what fueled that decision?

Zinsmeister: I did not actually intend to write a second book. As you point out, I didn’t intend to write a first book. One of the other things that I did after writing the first book about the hot war was that I commissioned and wrote the very first public opinion poll that had ever been done in Iraq. We did this in concert with Zogby International and that was actually carried out in the field in August of 2003 in four different cities.

That planted the seed for me returning because a lot of the results we found when we talked to ordinary everyday Iraqis were quite disparate, quite different from the impression one would get again from a lot of the mainline coverage of the war.

Part II

RCP: One of the things you mention in your book, one of the biggest obstacles, possibly, to realizing a full-functioning democracy in Iraq is a culture of corruption and cronyism that flourished under Saddam for decades. What’s your take on President Yawar and Prime Minister Allawi and what are their prospects for changing this culture?

Zinsmeister: The first thing I’ll say is that they both have a reputation for being personally clean. That’s important and not something you can take for granted in the Middle East. Whether it will continue to be the case, I don’t know.

As you point out, I have a whole chapter in Dawn over Baghdad where I talk very frankly about the cultural baggage that all Islamic nations carry in the Middle East — that all the Arab Islamic nations carry.

There is this tradition of "baksheesh", where you’re really expected to engage in petty bribery to get things done. People just assume that if you’ve got control of the contract for a construction job, you’re going to give a piece of the action to your uncle and you’re going to maybe take a piece of it for yourself. There are all these under the table payments and so forth that are just kind of accepted. That’s very difficult to square with transparent democratic government.

Likewise, there’s another real problem that soldiers mentioned to me. To put in the words of one of the soldiers I quote in the book, he said, “I’ve never been in a place where there are more class A liars than this country.” There is this tradition of shading the truth. Part of it is cultural. Arabs don’t like to say "no" bluntly or directly. So there’s a tradition of kind of dodging and hedging and failing to give a straight answer.

It’s also, as you point out, a function of the Saddam years, where honesty could be deadly. So people learned to keep their cards very close to their vests. One of the stunning things that I heard was when Colonel Fuller, the same Colonel I mentioned to you, said to me, "y’know I’ve been here for almost a full year and there’s only one person, one Iraqi, who I’m positive has never lied to me in that year." Really an amazing and a little bit depressing fact.

Let me jump in here quickly and say that I don’t think these cultural problems are insuperable. You have to just look at history and note that a majority of Muslims today live in democratic countries in places like Turkey, Indonesia, and India.

Islamic people have figured out alternate ways to make the cultural adjustments necessary to shift to democracy, but I just want to acknowledge that there is an adjustment necessary and it’s not easy.

One of the things I learned — and it was a bit of a revelation to me — but my time in Iraq taught me how important the Judeo-Christian inheritance is to the success of Western democracies. A lot of what we think of as democratic principles — that society should take care of its weakest and most vulnerable members, the idea of servanthood and that if you are a privileged or wealthy or powerful person you should try to find ways to serve your society — comes directly out of the Christian tradition and is basically recycled Christian doctrine.

A lot of the moral infrastructure that makes our democracy work comes out of our religious and cultural history. We forget that because it’s just part of the air we breathe, but in places that don’t have it, it is a problem.

As I pointed out, we know that Japan and other Asian countries have figured ways around this and we know that some Islamic countries have figured ways around this. But I think people need to be clear-eyed about it and understand that you have to actively seek out ways to cultivate some of this democratic infrastructure if it isn’t there already in your own cultural tradition.

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