Things fall apart: a reporter's harrowing account of Iraq's slide toward chaos.

• Author: Perkins, Bill
• Position: In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq - Book review

In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq By Nir Rosen Free Press, $26.00

Election Day, Jan. 30, 2005. Kirkuk. "A small Volkswagen approached from the side, driven by a young male who was scanning the streets. There was no sticker on his windshield. He was unauthorized to be driving. My driver stopped, and I was convinced we were about to get blown up. 'Go! Go!' I shouted. It was that familiar feeling in Iraq, nerves burning, skin tingling, helpless fear, expecting to die."

Anecdotes like this one, short and long, first-, second-, and third-hand, are woven together by freelance writer Nir Rosen in his book In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. (If his writing feels familiar, it is because much of Rosen's work has appeared in magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.) The American-born Rosen is a fluent Arabic-speaker who was able to blend in with the populace. He moved to Baghdad in April 2003 to cover the American-led invasion and stayed in Iraq for the next year and a half. His self-stated mission in writing this book was to tell "the story of the occupation, reconstruction, and descent into civil war of the new Iraq." From the perspective of the Iraqi people, at least, he succeeds. If you want to gain a better understanding and tangible feel, on a pragmatic, smell-of-the-streets level, of the cause-and-effect cycle of coalition actions upon the Iraqi people, then Rosen's book is a good place to start.

The title of the book is drawn from a verse of a hadith (an eyewitness account of the sayings of Mohammed) relating that when martyrs are killed, they receive eternal life, and their souls travel to heaven inside green birds. The book tells the story of how martyrs in Iraq have been and will be produced to sacrifice themselves for the Shia, or the Sunni, or Islam, or simply to drive out the occupation. As Rosen points out in his introduction, "For Americans, the word occupation conjures images of postwar Germany or Japan, and the repair of damaged societies." In sharp contrast, the Arabic word for occupation, ihtilal, carries with it extraordinary negative connotations: of the Crusaders, of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad, of the British occupation, of the Israelis in southern Lebanon and among Palestinians. Throughout the book, Rosen's underlying message rings loud and clear: Whatever chance the United States had of its presence not being viewed as an ihtilal was...