I found this excerpt powerfully depressing, illuminating, and important. It follows the theme of a discussion we had a while back on America Abroad about the Iraqi constitution, in which I argued what we needed most to know was what the Iraqi people think and several readers responded with links to blogs by Iraqis. I would also recommend Baghdad Diaries, by Nuha al-Radi, which describes her experience living in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and for the ensuing decade. The depressing part is how little we know, and worse, want to know, about an entire people and culture we sought to "liberate." Worse still, it didn't have to be this way; we have many diplomats and intelligence agents who know Iraqi culture and history and who would have been far more aware of the likely reactions of Iraqis; yet the State Department's plan for post-conflict reconstruction was tossed out the window early on by the State Department. And certainly there were many in the State Department and elsewhere in the government who understood that standing by and allowing the Iraqi national museum to be looted while we stood guard over oil installations and presumed sites of weapons of mass destruction was an unforgivable insult to an ancient culture that was, as every schoolchild knows, the cradle of civilization itself. It was also a world tragedy akin to the Taliban blowing up the ancient Afghan budhas.

But just as you have managed to put the war in Iraq in the micro-context of day to day life of ordinary Iraqis, let me try to fill in some of the larger historical context, not of the days after the war but of the decision to go to war itself. Things that seem so obvious now seemed very different in 2003. First, did you get a sense of how much Iraqi attitudes toward U.S. troops were colored by our failure to support a genuine Iraqi uprising among the Shiites in 1991? Our decision to let Hussein stay in power but then to impose sanctions that imposed terrible hardship on the Iraqi people? You write that most Iraqis were glad to see the end of Hussein. Would there have been any way for the U.S., acting with other governments under a U.N. banner, to remove Hussein but to avoid an occupation? And finally, how much awareness did you find among ordinary Iraqis of the horrors Hussein inflicted on those who opposed him, a face of Iraq that was dominant in the West before the war?

Finally, your book raises a much larger and critical point for all Americans. It is best captured, perhaps surprisingly, by Justice Kennedy in a recent New Yorker profile. Speaking about why he talks to foreign judges and looks to foreign legal decisions as aids in deciding difficult cases, he says: "If we are asking the rest of the world to adopt our idea of freedom, it does seem to me that there may be some mutuality there, that other nations and other peoples can define and interpret freedom in a way that's at least instructive to us." In other words, if we want to teach, much less preach, we have to be willing to learn. And learning means listening, hard. And asking questions. In other words, we have to do as a nation exactly what you did as one reporter, across all the people in all the countries of the world.