Mike Ferner went to Iraq just before the U.S. invasion in 2003, and again a year afterwards. He wanted to write about who the Iraqi people were and what their lives were like.
Almost a year after the invasion, he went back and talked to some of the same people and saw how their lives and their nation had changed. Now, two years later, comes his book, Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports From Iraq.
I was skeptical about this book. I have to confess, I don’t really know Mike Ferner, though I have known about him for years. I am the ombudsman for the newspaper in Toledo, where he lives. I have thought of him in the past primarily as a political activist.
Ferner was a city councilman for years. He won a minor bit of fame when he ran for mayor in 1993. That year he became one of the first candidates ever to be elected by the exit polls and unelected by the actual votes themselves.
I knew he was against the war from the start. This summer, he was arrested and convicted for painting antiwar slogans on highway passes in Toledo, something that struck me at the time as silly.
I feared his book might be propaganda. Instead, Mike Ferner has done, or tried hard to do, classic journalism of a kind all too few of my fellow professional journalists have done.
He went to see ordinary people who lived far from the cameras and microphones. True, he does not speak Arabic, and yes, his mind was made up that this war was wrong, right from the start.
Yet he made an effort to do journalism that was far and away better than what most of the so-called “real journalists” did.
He doesn’t mince words. His message comes through, loud and clear. But he went to Iraq, the real, “red zone” Iraq, outside the artificial world of the American fortress called the Green Zone. What Ferner reports may have come to us somewhat distorted by the language barrier and his own perspective. But it is now clear that his reporting was more credible than the reports from journalists “embedded” with advancing U.S. forces during the invasion.
If you look back at what he was writing then, it stands up pretty well, compared to the breathless, optimistic bunk much of the mainstream media was reporting about how we were greeted as liberators. Frankly, I think Ferner is right about this war.
But even if I thought we should be there, I would agree with this passage from his book: “The very least the common folk of Iraq deserve is to have their stories heard. We need to hear them as much for our own sake as for theirs.
“For until we open our ears and hearts to their stories, we will never be able to answer the larger questions.” Questions, that is about this war, and questions about ourselves. Think about it.
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