What I Heard About Iraq
An extraordinary montage of sound-bites and testimonies
The Iraq War has unleashed such a torrent of opinion - impassioned polemic, neo-con apologia, world-weary cynicism - that it feels like the important truths are being lost in a media feeding-frenzy. Eliot Weinberger eschews the rehtoric of the soapbox in an extraordinary montage of facts, sound bites and testimonies. He assembles an uncompromising and blackly comic narrative, which permits the voices of the war to speak for themselves, and allows the protagonists to damn themselves in their own words.
This pocket-sized volume is vast in scope, a work unlike any other you have read on Iraq, which finds an unexpected eloquence in its refusal to join in the facile grand-standing and selective amnesia of so much contemporary commentary.
Reviews
What I Heard About Iraq lays bare the false pieties and covert rapacity of the war and occupation. The result is something very special indeed.
Although Eliot Weinberger was a few blocks away from the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, his has been a rare voice of sanity on the subject ever since. Here he has harnessed his gifts as poet, translator and political commentator to produce a work of incantatory power in which the lies and misinformation about Iraq are allowed to collapse by sheer weight of accumulation.
In this remarkable piece of work, Eliot Weinberger nails the tragedy and absurdity of the War Against Terrorism. He is a master essayist, a furious thinker and an exceptionally elegant writer.