Ground up: John Lee Anderson avoided hanging out with U.S.troops--and wrote the best book on the Iraq war.

• Author: Harwood, Matthew
• Position: The Fall of Baghdad - Book Review

The Fall of Baghdad By Jon Lee Anderson The Penguin Press, $24.95

To New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson, Ala Bashir didn't look a confidant of Saddam Hussein. The London-educated physician seemed more like a Western university professor with his longish hair and corduroy suit, eschewing the bristling mustache look popular in the inner circle of the Iraqi dictator. Anderson first met Bashir in August 2000, after hearing him described as the most erudite man in Iraq, a free artist as well as one of Saddam's personal doctors. Anderson and Bashir became fast friends, and the Iraqi's experience becomes the lens through which Anderson tells of the Iraq war in his new book, The Fall of Baghdad.

Most of the first wave of Iraq war books by journalists were written from the perspective of the U.S. troops with whom the reporters were embedded. In this book, expanded from his extraordinary "Letters from Baghdad" dispatches for the New Yorker, Anderson tries something different. His eyewitness narrative follows a handful of Iraqis as the tense social peace of Saddam's dictatorship gives way to the "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad, Saddam's fall, and Iraq's descent into the current mire of crime and insurgency.

The most interesting and prescient of these Iraqis is Bashir. Humanistic, refined, and a secular Shiite, Bashir represents the antithesis of everything you would expect in a close associate of Hussein. It was Bashir's artistic talent that drew Hussein to him, an attraction that may well have been rooted in Hussein's own literary dreams. (Saddam fancied himself a writer, having penned at least three romance novels.)

Bashir's motives are less clear. Although he laments his relationship with Saddam--"The most bitter experience for a free man is to make a friendship with someone he doesn't like"--but Anderson discovers Bashir took pride in Saddam's lavish praise of him and his art. Anderson, believes that Bashir and Saddam held each other in mutual thrall, Saddam drawn to Bashir's artistic vision and Bashir to Saddam's ruthless use of power.

Impressed by Bashir's work, Saddam had the doctor create great sculptures glorifying his rule. Bashir responded by creating horrific surrealist monuments that were abstract criticisms of Saddam's reign (and Bashir's own private rebellion). The most memorable of these is the Epic of Saddam, in which an enormous soldier's fist stabs the eye of a hideous dragon with a lance, with all parts seeming to be part of one...