A journalist's view of Iraq

NBC reporter Richard Engel spent the past five years in Iraq, living in the "Red Zone" where his hotel room was once blown apart, making friends with Iraqi nationals and American soldiers, and coming to one conclusion: Iran is winning the Iraq war.

Iran is winning the war, Engel says in "War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq" (Simon & Schuster: $28), because it makes common cause with the Shiite majority in Iraq, because it is rebuilding Iraqi holy places, and because it is not America.

Perhaps it's best to start this book at the end. At the end, Engel travels to Najef and watches as an American general tries to explain why paperwork and red tape are keeping him from helping rebuild the city's airport runway.

"Iran, however, knew how to do business in Iraq. Iran had already built the airport's control towers, no tender necessary. Iran was also building a power plant and had even connected parts of southern Iraq to the Iranian electrical grid, effectively running an extension cord against the border. The Iraqis loved it."

"My Five Years in Iraq" may be the best journalistic view of the war. Engel has been there from the beginning, has close friends among the American military and had high hopes the invasion could make Iraq better.

He also has a chilling understanding of some of the religious conflicts in Iraq.

He notes that Shiites still mourn the1680 murder of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson, Ali, and says "the ceremonies are the most powerful and emotive outpouring of grief, religious zeal and passion I have ever seen . . ."

Here's the chilling part: "But the lamentations of the death (of Ali Hussein) are not merely religious. They are how many Shiites see their return to power in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. For Iraqi Shiites, the ascension to power has been not just a political victory, but a moment of religious ecstasy, the completion of Hussein's mission, which American troops unwittingly helped fulfill."

Gratitude, then, goes not to American liberators, but to Allah, who used them, after centuries, to fulfill his will.

In the meantime, Engel continues, Sunni Muslims consider Shiite rituals to "be beyond sacrilege, they are blasphemous."

All of which makes one wonder if the Iraqi civil war will ever be settled.

Engel talks about the pre-surge violence in Baghdad, about seeing a dog walking down a street carrying a human head. He talks about a taxi driver who carries a bloody knife and specializes in killing women, "I kill whores, women who go to the Green Zone to have sex with Americans."

He talks about spending more than an hour with President Bush in the White House and coming away with the conclusion that "It seemed to me that he was not, as many had accused, a front man for Dick Cheney's policies. This was his policy. He was the skipper. We were just passengers. The president had done a lot of reading. Since he'd invaded Iraq, he'd earned two Ph.Ds' worth of information about the country and the Middle East. He'd met all the players and had access to information that only a president could have. But he still had no idea how to deal with Arabs."

He writes about the surge, suggests it is the right policy enacted four years too late.

This review skips around the book. Engel tells his story in chronological order. There is just one constant: America doesn't really understand Iraq. Iran does. That's a bad combination.