Alas, there will be no more Shadid reports and features from the streets, alleys, souks, homes, hospitals, workplaces and cultures of the Arab countries. For on an assignment from The New York Times in a dangerous, mountainous area of Syria last week, this humble, brilliant, nuanced, generous, honest, brave double-Pulitzer-Prize winner (with another one likely on the way) died from an apparent asthma attack together with severe allergic reactions and exhaustion.
Mr. Shadid, only 43, with by a wife and two children, never wanted to be a war correspondent embedded in the U.S. military invasions and attacks of these countries. Fluent in Arabic, he wanted to be free to find out what was going on in the Arab communities throughout the Middle East and communicate the truth to the American people and the world.
This son of Oklahoma by way of the University of Wisconsin Journalism School did just that, for more than 15 years in the tumultuous Arab world from North Africa to West Asia. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote, "His coverage of the Middle East - from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and beyond - was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony. If you were in his presence, as I was - we were fellow correspondents and housemates in Baghdad - you watched his performances with the awe usually reserved for basketball stars and violin virtuosos."
The Pulitzer Board's encomium in 2004 cited Mr. Shadid for "his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended."
He not only went into areas fraught with danger, he also paid the price. In 2002 while covering the Israeli assaults in the West Bank for the Boston Globe, he narrowly escaped death. His photographer and colleague, Michael Robinson Chavez described the scene, "We were in Ramallah. A shot rang out and a piercing scream echoed through the deserted streets. I saw a Palestinian helping a wounded man. It was Anthony. Israeli Defense Forces had shot him in the neck."
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Pratap Chatterjee is the author of two books about the war on terror: Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War and Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004). He is the former executive director of CorpWatch and a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR.
Photo Credit: David ShankboneIn this fine country of ours, there is "a wall of separation between Church and State," as Thomas Jefferson once put it. And thank God for that (at least, if you’re inclined to believe in it). Our country has been so much stronger and more free as a result of having that wall. Here's the thing, though: having that wall doesn't mean that the cord linking politics and religion can ever be severed, at least not in this country where religion lives so fervently. The fact is that the USA remains, by a considerable margin, more religious and more Christian than any other Western nation, with close to 80 percent of us still calling ourselves Christians (in spite of somewhat falling percentages on that number in recent years).Even beyond that, though, religion permeates our culture, our language, our traditions, our public rituals, our history, and yes, our political debate. More than anything else -- more than political party, more than political history, more than any cultural icon whether it be Shakespeare, Star Wars or John Wayne — Christian religion is at the core of what America believes in and relates to. Progressives ignore or dismiss religion at our peril: we will never get to a majority political coalition in this country without understanding religion and the people who believe in it. The fact is that religion has driven most of our country's great conflicts and has been the inspiration for most of our progress. The abolitionists and the pro-slavery Southerners, the suffragists and the appalled conservative ministers who railed against them, the Populists of the late 1800s and the High Church business elite who were locked in combat, the Protestant Prohibitionists and the heavily Catholic "wets" who opposed them, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950-'60s and the racist but Bible-beating Southerners who fought them: they have all fought over an impossibly tangled blend of religion and politics.The good news is that the religious fault-lines are pretty much the same kind of fault-lines as the political ones political activists are more used to. In religion as in politics, conservatives tend to be rather individualistic, as the ultimate goal is to win the reward of heaven for yourself. Conservatives tend to value tradition and traditional hierarchy above change and openness, believing that too much change is scary and that only traditional authority figures can protect us. Conservatives tend to believe that an excess of democracy and "rights,” whether in government or a church setting, is a bad thing. God's role for conservatives is to punish us if we stray from the one true path. Religious progressives, on the other hand, are drawn less by hope of heaven and fear of hell than by the appeal of the sacred community, and the teachings of religion to love their neighbors as themselves. They tend to be more open to new ideas, new kinds of leaders, and new ways of thinking about faith; and much less inclined toward thinking there is one true path.The happy thing about the American experiment with freedom of religion — which actually echoes ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity became the official state religion — is that while people are inevitably shaped, motivated and drawn to politics by their religion and philosophy, our constitution's wall of separation between church and state has generally (with some notable exceptions) kept our politics far more free of zealotry and violence than you find in countries without that wall. For most of world history, politics and religion were so intertwined they corrupted each other and caused a great many bad things. The fact that this has not happened as much in America is a tribute to founders like Jefferson.
The unholy troika -- Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney: No, if they were on Death Row where they belong, that wouldn't solve the debt problem they did so much to create. But what if they and all their war-profiteering friends, relations, and cronies were to voluntarily make restitution for all their ill-gotten gains derived from the troika's crimes?
Drawing on Thomas Ricks's The Generals, Filkins paints a vivid picture of the imbecility and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika's planning for ward and the incompetence of the military forces the Big Three threw at Iraq. And unfortunately the answer to the question of how good General Petraeus really was turns out to be that on the whole in Iraq he was good enough to largely get Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld off the hook for the true monstrousness of their actual record, which should make them amont the most hated figures ever to hold public office in this country.
