Two recent offerings provide some real insight into the mess in Iraq.

First, Vanity Fair’s long article on the Haditha incident.

William Langewiesche writes…

The Euphrates is a peaceful river. It meanders silently through the desert province of Anbar like a ribbon of life, flanked by the greenery that grows along its banks, sustaining palm groves and farms, and a string of well-watered cities and towns. Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. These are among the places made famous by battle—conservative, once quiet communities where American power has been checked, and where despite all the narrow measures of military success the Sunni insurgency continues to grow. On that short list, Haditha is the smallest and farthest upstream. It extends along the Euphrates’ western bank with a population of about 50,000, in a disarray of dusty streets and individual houses, many with walled gardens in which private jungles grow. It has a market, mosques, schools, and a hospital with a morgue. Snipers permitting, you can walk it top to bottom in less than an hour, allowing time enough to stone the dogs. Before the American invasion, it was known as an idyllic spot, where families came from as far away as Baghdad to while away their summers splashing in the river and sipping tea in the shade of trees. No longer, of course. Now, all through Anbar, and indeed the Middle East, Haditha is known as a city of death, or more simply as a name, a war cry against the United States.

Read the whole thing, though it runs through 12 pages online.

Better yet, consider a subscription to the print version. Where else can you find such well-written pieces that cover everything from serious in-depth coverage of current events, to James Wolcott, to fascinating portraits of old oddballs, crooks and old Hollywood, with a dose of Us Weekly mixed in for good measure.

Each issue is jam-packed with material. That is if you can get through the huge amount of ads and variable paper stock boundaries.

And, though it has already aired, My Country, My Country, a documentary about the preceding months before the January 2005 Iraqi election shown on PBS’s POV, is incredible, revealing, and depressing.

The web site has quite a bit of interesting content, too, including video clips and an interview with the director, Laura Poitras.

One response from Poitras…

I think in order to understand this war, we need to understand Iraq and we need to understand it from the perspective of Iraqis. Everything about their culture is different from our culture: their religion, their family structure, etc. I think we learn about those differences and what Iraqi values are in the course of the film. That perspective needed to be told, and I was very fortunate that Dr. Riyadh would let me into his house to do that.

Dr. Riyadh’s story is a really great way to gain insight into understanding the contradictions of the war. What does it mean to invade a country to bring democracy? It’s a huge contradiction. He’s a person who’s caught in that web and trying to do the right thing, and ultimately I think that the contradictions of this endeavor led to a very tragic outcome for him personally and for many of the people — both from the U.S. military and from the United Nations — who are trying to implement this effort. It is also a film that I think will challenge political perspectives from both sides, because it really is, in a sense, a celebration of democracy, and at the same time it’s a critique of the occupation.

The U.S. is now very isolated in its occupation of Iraq. All the people who run the embassy live inside a compound that they never leave; they never have interaction with Iraqis, they never go to restaurants, they never eat local food, they never go into private homes. The fact is that the U.S. is trying to occupy or bring democracy to this country with very little knowledge of the country and the people, and I felt that I couldn’t tell the story without telling that perspective.

At the same time, I didn’t want to lose the larger perspective. I wanted to have a juxtaposition of the personal story of this man and this family with the story of the U.S. military, which is really calling the shots. I want that tension between the people who are making decisions and the people whose lives are impacted by those decisions.