books discussed in this essay:

The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer
Douglas & McIntyre, 2005
467 pp., $37

Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War
by Anthony Shadid
H. B. Fenn, 2005
424 pp., $35

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
HarperCollins/Fourth Estate, 2005
1,366 pp., $60

Just outside Mosul, Iraq, across the river from the last Kurdish peshmerga checkpoint, sits the Sunni Arab village of Hassan Shami, a collection of walled homes nestled among small hills and dry, white-gravel gullies. Nearby is the River Zab. A few months before I visited, American forces raided a resistance cell that had been based there.

I went to the local mosque to interview Sunni Arabs about the then-upcoming constitutional referendum and national elections. But for the men I met there, democracy remained abstract. During the first post-Saddam elections, in January 2004, no ballots arrived and no one explained why. Now, almost a year after that initial vote, the eldest of the men, Faisal Faati Ali, said the village would vote against the new constitution “because there is nothing in it for us.” Ali and the others went on to explain that there had been no public investment in this town of 2,000 since the war started. “We have received nothing in two years,” Ali said. “We do not have enough water. Our only power is from generators and we need a new school and staff for the health clinic.” A younger man named Mafud Mohamad added: “Our primary school can’t even hold all the children inside.”