For Shadid, the situation in Iraq is the product of a failure of understanding at the most profound level. American policymakers simply did not comprehend the way that so many years of oppression had scarred the Iraqi psyche. "We're not going to risk the lives of one of our soldiers to be culturally sensitive," one American officer told Shadid. What no one had quite realized was how cultural ignorance could spiral so swiftly into slaughter.

"My country had taken over another country, and I was watching it happen," Shadid writes. "The United States now controlled Iraq's destiny; we would now decide its fate. And we understood remarkably little about it."

The Iraqis were equally baffled. The Americans who came as liberators remained as occupiers. They promised democracy and peace, yet they could not stop the looting, or even, at the most basic level, ensure that the electricity worked in Baghdad. "Stuff happens. Freedom's untidy," declared the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

In Shadid's telling, the simplicity of official American thinking, intoxicated by its own optimistic rhetoric, contrasts with the raw shock, emotional complexity and confusion of Iraqis.

Perhaps the most moving testaments are those of Amal, the adolescent diarist, whose thoughts slowly evolve from nai虉ve Hussein propaganda, to uncertain elation, to blank despair: "Oh God, why does this agony surround us?" Shiites - able to celebrate their rites openly for the first time in a generation, only to see their holy places attacked by suicide bombers and the celebrants murdered in droves - echo that cry.