Customer Reviews

Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World

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I do not feel myself qualified to write an exacting review of Aftermath, but I simply had to post a small piece in counter-distinction to the only other available customer review, which I found vapid and deliberately misleading.

Aftermath is absolutely essential reading for anyone curious about the history and current affairs of geopolitical activity in the Middle East. Rosen writes in a style which I found perfectly suited to both the material and its urgency. There is simply no better single source of information on this topic.

One reviewer criticized this book because it is full of stories of individuals and moves from person to person...

That is exactly why this book is important. Think back on how we learned about the war in the news. Looking back through old issues of magazines like Time, the early part of the war was portrayed like a football play book with arrows and circles for the "game plan." Eventually, there was talk of ethnic groups, but hardly anything in depth.

I used to have much more naive ideas about the war and enlisted in the army when I was younger. When I deployed in the surge in 2007, we still had a very shallow understanding that 'if we only try harder, we'll beat the insurgents.' While in Iraq, I read an article that Rosen wrote called "The Myth of the Surge" and it was a rare piece that actually understood what was going on on the ground. My own unit had been negotiating with former enemies and Rosen explains why certain groups resisted and why others didn't and why some ended up working together with us.

The want for a simple narrative of good guys vs. bad guys is exactly what caused so many of these problems to begin with! Slapping easy labels on things helped the public to digest the war (and seemed to help justify it in the minds of those who planned it), but as we all learned, it wasn't that simple.

It is because the war in Iraq and its effects on the surrounding region are so complex that a book like this--that goes in depth about the broad array of different responses--is of such importance. If we truly want to learn why the war played out the way it did, we need to discard the simplistic understanding of it that made it such a mess. If you are prepared for the complex details and nuances of all the different factions and how various groups reacted to various decisions and events, than this book is certainly worth your time!

I will start off by agreeing, reluctantly but whole-heartedly, with the criticism of Rosen's writing made in the review by Z. Cohen. This has got to be one of the most tedious books I have ever slogged through. It's roughly equivalent to reading a 560 page newspaper article. There is little flow between sections - we often jump abruptly to a whole new topic. There doesn't seem to be much order to the presentation - entire paragraphs could be put in an entirely different order and it would make little if any difference. Much of the text is basically a series of long quotes (not blocked, even when the quote comprises an entire paragraph or more), which read the way people talk and, hence, are difficult to follow. In fact, I have to admit that, try as I might, I couldn't force my way through the whole thing. I skipped the entire section on Afghanistan and only skimmed the final chapter.

Nonetheless, I believe the book deserves more than one star. I think Rosen is a consummate reporter. He interviewed hundreds of people for the book - Sunnis, Shiites, clerics, militiamen, militia leaders, government officials, American soldiers and officers, humanitarian workers, and simply ordinary Iraqis (and Syrians, Lebanese, etc.). He's not afraid to go where the story takes him and he put himself at great risk to cover events that few other English-speaking journalists were covering. Because of this work, we Americans have a perspective from the ground which we might otherwise not have if we rely solely on administration reports and embedded reporters.

But on the other hand, a 560 page book needs to have a focus, more of a point and needs to ultimately have an opinion. Rosen could have interviewed hundreds of Americans, from Main Street to Wall Street, regarding the economic melt-down, but without a focus and a point to make, it would just be a lot of random people's opinions wrapped up into one big package. That's essentially what "Aftermath" is, only regarding the Iraqi view of the Iraq war.

Furthermore, if Rosen's point was to increase sympathy for the Iraqis, he failed with me, at least as far as sympathy for Iraqi men. I do have sympathy for innocent women and children caught up in the testosterone-laden mess. But nearly every man that Rosen interviewed seems to be more part of the problem than the solution. Nearly everyone denies that sectarianism was a problem before the Americans came, and they all deny that they personally support sectarianism. But as Rosen gives them more rope to hang themselves, they nearly all eventually espouse anger, hatred and a desire for "revenge" against members of other sects, ethnicities, religions, etc. Some Lebanese Sunni protesters sum it up nicely on page 393: "We don't want sectarianism, but God is with the Sunnis!" Nearly every person Rosen interviews is focused on getting revenge for past injustices, real or perceived, some dating all the way back to the murder of Hussein, rather than focusing on how to move forward and build a new country.

I will give Rosen kudos for exposing how little the American forces and leadership knew about Iraq, its population and its culture at the time of invasion, how long it took them to start caring enough to start learning, and how inadequate their efforts were. Time after time the Americans, intentionally or unintentionally, ignite sectarian firestorms by favoring one group over another or pitting groups against each other. It took American forces far too long to recognize that they had stumbled into the midst of a civil war (which they themselves had helped to launch through the removal of Saddam Hussein and subsequent actions such as radical de-Baathification and the disbanding of the Iraqi army). Even once they realized and, much later, admitted, to the "sectarian strife", they didn't know what to do about it. There were perhaps hundreds of different militias, large and small, organized or not, all claiming to be fighting to "protect" Iraq and/or its people, but each in their own way involved in escalating the violence, murder and chaos.

One opinion that Rosen does express, repeatedly, is that America can't simply wash its hands of Iraq and pretend that it has nothing to do with us, as we have done in Rwanda and Sudan, for instance. I don't disagree with Rosen, but he needs to take this idea further. Having broken it, and therefore bought it, what do we do with it now? I agree that it probably would have been better had we never invaded or occupied Iraq, but that ship has long sailed. Rosen has very mixed feelings about the surge (as do most analysts and experts), but he doesn't explore what specifically he agrees or disagrees with or what he would suggest doing differently.

Reading this book was a lot like reading raw field notes for an anthropological study - valuable in its own right, of course, but difficult to make much sense of without an overarching framework. This work is valuable for posterity and historical reference, but it won't do much to inform the opinion of average citizens or guide policy decisions.

I have high regard for Nir Rosen, and I make a point of watching all his youtube interviews, in which he appears bright, balanced, well informed and consistent. I also consider he is a brave young man -- who else would walk into those war zones as an un-embedded journalist, as he does?

And after reading the glowing reviews from Chomsky et al, I considered 'Aftermath' to be a must-have purchase.

However, I have to say, the book is just not that well written -- the prose is leaden, clumsy, confused and unclear, and Rosen meanders all over the place, often telling us irrelevant details that just muddy and befuddle his style and narrative flow -- do we really need to know that one of his interview subjects learned English from listening to hip hop songs, or that another had put on weight since Rosen last saw him, or had recently shaved his moustache? Rosen's attempts to give form to his characters emerges as wooden and simple. It becomes difficult to sustain motivation to wade through such a chaotic writing style, which is often dry and lacking in character (a surprising point, since his online interviews are so involving).

Rosen paints an unremittingly bleak view of the possibilities ahead for Iraq. It seems that every single man he interviews is full of violent hatred and thirst for vengeance. I understand the levels of relentless chaos and hate and violence that must exist in places like Iraq, but ultimately, Rosen's work de-humanises Arabs -- the Arabs in Rosen's pages are so drenched in blood, so disturbed, that they become impossible to recognise as fellow human beings. I must say, I expected the book to be extremely violent and unsettling (Iraq is not a playground) but I was very surprised by Rosen's de-humanised and unsympathetic depictions of Arabs throughout the whole text.

Compare, for a moment, with Robert Fisk's work, which also focuses on the Middle East and Islam : Fisk is very honest about the levels of extreme and horrific violence that Shia/Sunni people visit on each other -- but at the same time, he constantly reminds us of Arab humanity, and the fact that Arabs are no different from the rest of us in their hopes and dreams and aspirations. Fisk also reminds us of the demagoguery, cunning and levels of violence caused by gentile, Jew, and American, which is often far more extreme, albeit carried out by mass bombing attacks, or machine gun, or by paying other factions do it, rather than by bloody knife, beating or kidnapping. Rosen does not provide such balance of approach in his work, and each Arab emerges as a completely deranged psychopath -- and stupid too.

Rosen only seems to select for interview every incredibly violent, ignorant, tribally driven, blood thirsty, vengeful, hateful, apoplectic, seemingly psychotic, murderous individual he finds in the darkened corners of Iraq.

It gets tiring and draining after the 200th page of such relentless, bleak, vicious, hate.

It is clear that Rosen is a talented, intelligent young writer and a courageous one too. Much of his work seems to be of a similar standard to that of Fisk and Pilger. It is also clear that he has collected a wealth of information here that is valuable as a historical document as well as being valuable for students of political science, current affairs and history.

But -- why didn't the publishers pay a good editor to sculpt and hone the massive amount of often jumbled and cobbled together information here, to offer the reader a punchy, concise volume? As it stands, the reader is faced with a difficult, badly organised, confusing, often infuriating volume to wade into.

Chomsky recommended Rosen's work in the sleeve notes - but, I wonder if Chomsky actually read it.

I had no problem with the author's writing style. In fact, I very much enjoyed it. This book gave me a much clearer idea of what the people of Iraq have had to endure as a result of this pointless war.

AFTERMATH: FOLLOWING THE BLOODSHED OF AMERICA'S WARS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD offers a more general survey of Muslim-American encounters in the Middle East than most books would present, and comes from a journalist who describes his personal journey through the region. Rosen was in Baghdad to witness how the first tensions between Shiites and Sunnis became a civil war. He analyzes tactics, scenarios, and presents a viewpoint spiced by his ability to speak Iraqi Arabic. Interviews with insurgents and counterinsurgents alike and a penchant for truth lends to an analysis key to any Middle East social issues collection.

In 50 years, I fully expect this book will be used to teach the history of this conflict. It is a masterwork that portrays the conflict from all sides, including that of the innocent bystanders in many countries besides just Iraq. I'm deliberately avoiding talking directly about the specific conflicts in this review, but suffice to say it's very uncomfortable reading. (Not due to writing style as one of the other reviewers stated, but due to the sheer brutality of what went on and the sense of being unable to stop what you can see coming as you read.)

This is not an easy book to read, but for anyone who want to begin to understand the current politics (especially in light of the Tunisian revolt!), this is a must read. Before you even finish it, you'll start to understand the context events are viewed in by the people in these areas, which is critical to understanding what matters and which way events are going to swing. With the recent return of Al-Sadr to Iraq, Hizbollah pulling out of the Lebanese government, the Algerian and Egyptian riots, the now fall of the Tunisian government, it is *extremely* important to know both what is going on and why it is happening.

I purchased this book after listening to the author's interview on Democracy Now recently. Between what I heard there and the glowing endorsements from Noam Chomsky and Andrew Bacevich, both of whom I have immense respect for, I had incredibly high expectations for this book. Nothing could have prepared me for the utter holocaust of writing that is Aftermath. I only made it 25% of the way through before I was overwhelmed with intellectual pain and had to give up on it. I am a very patient and tenacious individual, and I almost never bail out on a book I start no matter how bad it is, but I simply could not read it.

Aftermath seems like it could have been written by a strobe light. It is a constant stream of moments, illuminated with far too much intensity, appearing in disjointed sequence that confuse and overwhelm the reader. It almost seems like he published his field notes from his time as a journalist in the middle east, with absolutely no editing whatsoever.

After a long and meandering introduction to the first part of the book about the descent of Iraq into sectarian violence, Rosen states that despite conventional wisdom that sectarian strife has a long history in Iraq and has always been there, the civil war that eventually occurred subsequent to the occupation was entirely the fault of the US. He then utterly fails to demonstrate that in any cohesive way. He strings together seemingly random incidences of violence between sects, with almost no mention of the US. The writing style organizes information into small to medium sized paragraphs, each dealing with some specific moment or event, which may or may not be at all related to the paragraphs before and after it, and which have no transition or flow. There is no sense of narrative whatsoever. There is very little analysis or commentary, just a mind dump of information. There seems to have been little thought into considering what information is relevant to what the author is trying to say at any given time (if the author even knows what he is trying to say at any given time), and there is vast amounts of superfluous text.

If the information is coherent and interesting, I don't mind a boring book at all. However, the presence of vast amounts of irrelevant information (describing people's mustaches, passing comments about his friends that are not important in relation to the event he is describing, and other such frivolous details) makes it a chore to get to the interesting information. Given the disjointed structure I mentioned earlier, it's difficult to keep interesting information in context. The author constantly skips around geographical areas and does not keep a clear chronology. He often includes large portions of people's speech without putting it in context. After reading a section about events and speech towards the end of the sectarian violence in Iraq, he suddenly, with no preface, included a long speech about Muslim unity and predictions that there will be no civil war. This is confusing, given the previous discussion of violence, but a page or so later, you realize that he was quoting something someone said years earlier, without making that clear.

With his tendency to skip around with no transition or flow, it's very difficult to pick out the occasional insight or interesting informative text and incorporate it into some kind of coherent thesis.

Beyond the content, the style of the book was eminently unreadable. His tone was dominated by plain, short, repetitive sentences like "We saw Muqtada Speak. He said ____. We got in the car and drove to Baghdad. There was an Iraqi Police Checkpoint. There had been a Sunni attack". There were occasional variations in syntax, but some paragraphs read like that for some time, and I found it exceptionally dry, on top of all the other problems I've described.

Frankly, I am quite shocked at the poor quality of this book. It makes me question whether anyone who endorsed it actually read it. I simply can't understand how Rosen, a well regarded journalist with excellent credentials, could write anything so atrocious. I purchased this book on kindle, and perhaps the kindle version is an unedited manuscript or something? I'm also rather incensed that the kindle version cost twice as much as normal kindle books. I don't mind paying extra for quality writing, but overcharging me for such drivel is insulting. After forcing myself to read 25% of this book, my brain felt dirty and violated. I rarely drink, but I found myself needing to cleanse my mind of this atrocity with copious quantities of toxic chemicals.