Summary
Unless you're a steadfast prowar or antiwar partisan who believes Iraqis are all jolly little creatures merely flashing into existence when it's time to dip their fingers in magical purple voter's ink or, conversely, that the country's entire population is either imprisoned at Abu Ghraib or the victim of a suicide bomber, it's likely you've been craving a fuller perspective on the complicated state of affairs in Iraq for some time now.
At first blush, Nir Rosen's "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq" seems a legitimate contender. Aided by what he describes as a "dark complexion and grasp of Iraqi Arabic," Mr. Rosen descends deeper into the bowels of the Iraqi insurgency than any previous American reporter, delivering a fascinating series of behind-enemy-lines vignettes replete with short-yet-revealingportraits encompassing everyone from radical Shi'ite preacher Moqtada al-Sadr to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Zarqawi to Kurdish hero Gen. Rostam Hamid Rahim.See the full content of this document
Extract
Pyrrhic Reporting ; a Biased Look at Iraq
While mostly allowing insurgent leaders to have their unmolested say, Mr. Rosen nonetheless happily scoffs at rank-and-file Islamic militants' mystical tall tales of AK-47s firing for hours without r...
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