Dateline: Iraq

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What is his advice to Western journalists in Iraq? "Don't believe the first thing that people tell you. Remember, people here are survivors," he says. "Somebody will tell you something, and you think that's what they mean, but very often that is far from it. There is always something deeper."

The political nature of the story, he thinks, drives reporters to paint Iraqis one-dimensionally. "The sense of empathy, which is the real power of journalism, is lost. And what you get is a kind of sympathy," Fattah says. "I think Iraqis are very much afraid of having people feel sorry for them. They don't want to be forgotten, but they don't want to be victims either."

George Packer, The New Yorker

Daily reporters must deal with the tyranny of the deadline, but George Packer, who spent five weeks in Iraq for The New Yorker and produced a stunning 20,000-word examination of the postwar situation, had the luxury of time. He says, "I found I needed two or three hours, if not two or three visits, to understand all the factors that went into Iraqi attitudes toward the occupation." The Iraqis he profiled emerge as complex and, in many ways, conflicted.

Reporting on Iraqis after 30 years of totalitarian Ba'athist rule felt more like a job for Freud than for a magazine writer, Packer says. Perhaps "what was truer of Iraqis than of most people was how much talking they needed to do in order to express the fullness of their thinking," he says. "It was a bit like therapy. You are peeling back layers and layers of dogma and rumor."

During many interviews, "I would start getting angry at my translator because what he was telling me didn't make sense," Packer says. "The conversation just kept on leaping around without any rational back and forth. And he would say to me, 'George, I'm giving you a word-for-word translation.'"

Many of the Iraqis he talked to had a hard time developing clear arguments, explaining themselves fully, and, as Packer put it, "understanding their own situation." Packer thinks this might be related to the fact that the Iraqis were isolated and denied free will for so long. A psychiatrist whom Packer quoted in the article explained that Iraqis lack "the power to experience freedom."

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