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An outstanding book.

The first book, entitled Revolution Day will be Rageh Omaar’s story of the recent Iraq war. During that conflict millions of people turned to Omaar for the quality of his reports from Baghdad. This will be the most important book to come out of the conflict. Omaar has reported from the region for several years and his proposal demonstrates his uniquely personal and insightful response both to the country and its people. It shows that he is not just a fine correspondent but also a terrific writer. Omaar’s television and radio reports have secured his position among some of the finest correspondents of recent years and Revolution Day will be a vivid and resonant account of a conflict at the centre of modern politics that will be read by generations of readers for many years to come.

Reviews:

Of all the books written about the horrific and terrifying mess we have made of Iraq, this has to be one of the best ever. The author’s strength is that he lived in Iraq before the coalition invaded; as an Arabic speaker he was able to move amongst the ordinary folk and tell their stories. He has no illusions about Saddam’s regime, nor about what followed; he tells it as he saw it, in writing so clear that its skill would be a pleasure to read were his subject not so awful. I cannot recommend this book too highly; the simple and direct speaking of truth to power.

If, like myself, you have read several books and acreages of newsprint devoted to the development and outcome of the recent war in Iraq, you may find it helpful, as I have just done, to `rewind’ to the start of the matter and check your recollections. If you are new to the topic and want to start at the beginning, then this book is about the beginning of it, whereat to start. Rageh Omaar was there. He had been Iraq correspondent for the BBC for several years prior to the invasion, he chose not to leave and was in Baghdad throughout the shock-and-awe phase, the fall of Saddam’s regime and the immediate consequences. He does not even mention the report that many will particularly remember him for: he was on the plinth of Saddam’s statue in Firdoos Square after it was pulled down and the London anchorman said `Rageh, raise you arm so that we can see you.’ The correspondent, who is tall, walked across the plinth waving as he walked, and the sense of authenticity was unforgettable. He left for a while to see his family, but he went back, and his postscript offers his own assessment of what it all amounted to.

This book is in the best tradition of BBC reporting. Facts are paramount, and the occasional inferences are strictly related to his observations. He not only saw, he listened as well. Rageh Omaar speaks English in the impeccable tones of an expensive English education, but he was born in Somalia and speaks Arabic, several dialects of it, apparently. He was able to converse with Iraqis and he lets us know what they said without either interpretation or embellishment. He does not lecture or preach or moralise, and if he does not give us much in the way of hypothetical `better news’ that I have heard the BBC accused of not reporting, it is quite obvious that this is because there was next to no better news to report. THIS is what it was like, and this is someone who did not have to rely on second-hand opinions. He describes some early bombardment of civilian areas by the coalition, as well as the coalition bombing of the HQ of both Al Jazeera and Reuters, the co-ordinates of which were known to the coalition forces. He quotes coalition allegations in this context about `human shields’ purportedly used by the regime, but in these cases there was nothing of the kind, nor does he ever mention any others. (I should say that he was no enthusiast for Saddam’s regime, which he depicts as being one of thugs and gangsters.) He is particularly enlightening regarding the looting that followed immediately on the air strikes. Ransacking of the luxurious apartments of members of the hated regime was one thing, but the wholesale vandalism was something else, and too organised, he says, to have been anything except a pre-planned scorched earth policy. He cites the coalition protection of the Oil Ministry and Ministry of the Interior while the rest was neglected as a glaring error, and he traces the start of the Iraqi public’s disenchantment with the occupation from that gaffe onwards. There is, naturally, a good deal about the life of a reporter in such conditions, and it is highly informative in its own right. However this is an Arabic speaker, and the best things of all are his reports of what `ordinary’ Iraqis told him. The picture that comes across is of a people repressed by a brutal and sadistic regime who briefly entertained hopes of genuine `liberation’, hopefully leaving them to run their country as they desired. The number of ways in which we find that to be not the case are more various than perhaps we realise, and any reader who gains an overall impression of brainwashed ignorance, arrogant dishonesty and doublespeak, and downright incompetence on the part of the occupiers will have no trouble in gaining it, but this reporter is too professional and self-controlled to spell it out (if it is even what he thinks). After a short absence he came back, this time starting in the south at Basra and some smaller locations. As before, he is first and foremost a reporter, but this time he offers rather more analysis, and it is mainly analysis of a catalogue of errors, pre-eminent among those being Bremer’s almost incomprehensibly stupid policy of de-Ba’athification. At the start, Rageh Omaar had described in thoughtful detail the disastrous impact of the UN sanctions, that followed by the dissolution of the army which turned loose a whole population of unemployed, dispossessed and humiliated citizenry, resentful, vengeful and armed. Now here was Bremer consummating this process of total annihilation of the state apparatus which had always been relied on by the people under Saddam but whose fundamental importance to them had been immeasurably increased by the sanctions.

It’s not clear to me how any significantly different picture could be obtained by any fair-minded and attentive reader, but that’s my own view and it may not be yours. However, you see it, check your basic understanding of what actually happened from this book, and see how other versions hold up against it. It doesn’t get more honest than this.

Rageh Omaar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1967. He read modern history at Oxford and began his journalistic career at The Voice newspaper. In 1991 he moved to Ethiopia as a freelance journalist. For the next five years he worked as a broadcast journalist for the World Service and then became BBC TV News’ Africa Correspondent, based in Johannesburg. Latterly he has reported for BBC TV from Afghanistan and Iraq. He moved back to the UK after the Iraq conflict.