Book Review: The Unraveling
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The Unraveling:High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq
by Emma Sky
Public Affairs, 2015
Emma Sky, now a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute, volunteered back in 2003 to go to Iraq, seconded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to help administer the province of Kirkuk, where she was Governorate Coordinator from 2003 to 2004. She'd been opposed to intervention of the U.S.-led Coalition and went to Iraq in part to apologize to Iraqis, but, as she writes in her intriguing, frustrating new book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, she came to love the country and its people. Her book follows the roller-coaster course of events in Iraq from the early years of US occupation, through the Surge of 2007 (when she was political advisor to US General Ray Odierno, which she remained until 2010), to the withdrawal of US troops under President Obama and the subsequent rise of the Islamic State, which she calls “Da'ash,” and its takeover of huge chunks of Iraq.
She describes “Da'ash” as “the hideous product of a sacralised determinism born out of secular failure” and goes on in her unintentionally maddening way:
And many Arab governments remain incapable of responding to the demands of their increasingly young and interconnected populations. Da'ash feeds on a Sunni sense of disenfranchisement and grievance and claims to offer a better future in the form of an idealised past – an unmoored, postmodern Caliphate with globalised ambitions and a new territorial base. The rise of Da'ash (the successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq) and the sectarianisation of conflict in the region are symptoms of highly complex and intractable pathologies in the Middle East. They show that ideas matter.
The neat and almost comprehensive way this characterization talks about “highly complex and intractable pathologies” in the Middle East while soft pedaling or eliding altogether the Coalition's role in worsening those pathologies is the besetting problem of The Unraveling: despite her best intentions to be an even-handed memoirist, Sky is also a true believer (in a heartbreaking bit of foreshadowing, she dedicates her book both to her Iraqi friends – and to General Odierno, one of their conquerors and gauleiters) – an amazing feat of mental ambidexterity that's appearing in more and more Terror War memoirs. Thousands of men and women – combatants and non-combatants alike – went through a decade of tension, drama, and sacrifice (many, like Sky, voluntarily) unlike anything they'd ever known, and now they naturally want to account for that experience somehow. The impulse toward air-clearing autobiographical honesty conflicts with the fact that the Terror Wars were a purely bad thing – born of lies, fed on bodies, ended only for political expediency – and books like Unraveling result.Sky, an Oxford graduate, is by turns melodramatic:
TAT, TAT, TAT, TAT, TAT, TAT. I awoke abruptly to the sound of automatic gunfire. I looked at my clock. It was four in the morning. Boom. Several colossal explosions suddenly shook the house. Paralysed by the deafening sound, I remained in bed, totally naked, curled up in a ball with my hands over my ears, shaking like a leaf, my heart pounding as I watched the dust pouring in through the sandbags. Would the walls cave in? My top-floor bedroom, a roof extension, shook so much that I feared it was going to become detached from the rest of the house, with me in it.
And slightly star-struck:
I caught sight of [US ambassador Paul] Bremer on the helicopter pad. He appeared dashing and energetic, immaculately dressed in a suit with the combat boots which came to be his signature. I thought he was in his mid forties until someone told me he was in his sixties. He was surrounded by bodyguards from Blackwater, a private security company. Travelling in Bremer's entourage had all the glamour and excitement of a presidential campaign trail.
But the effect is equally chilling in either instance, since on the one hand the terrifying experience of being rocket-shelled out of bed at night was one experienced by hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in the course of the war and on the other hand that sexy US ambassador is being guarded by paid mercenaries who aren't accountable to the US Commander-in-Chief. It's doubtful that Sky realized while writing the book just how many of her anecdotes would reflect not the considered impressions of an on-the-ground observer but instead the kind of dangerous fatuousness that prompted the war in the first place:
I happened to be in Cairo on 9/11, assessing how to strengthen Egyptian human rights organizations. In my hotel room, I watched live CNN coverage of the attacks on the Twin Towers. There was feverish excitement across Cairo: at last, America was getting a dose of its own medicine; the “Great Satan” was experiencing some of the pain it inflicted on others in the world; America was getting its comeuppance. That night, as I floated in a felucca out on the Nile, I had a sense that our world would never be the same.
It's tricky trying to determine the motivation for writing a book like Unraveling. If the purpose is to warn about the dangers of “Da'ash” (here's hoping the term doesn't catch on – it's bad enough the West is letting these mouth-foaming savages set their own military agenda … giving them a fun and sexy new name would just make things that much worse), the point is well taken, especially since those are the strongest parts of this book. If the point is to praise the good and upstanding members Sky knew among the Coalition forces, the point becomes extremely problematic, since those good and upstanding people helped to destroy a country. And if the point is, after all, to further that apology to the Iraqi people, an equivocal thing like this is hardly mission accomplished.