Chain reacctions
WRITING from Iraq for Vanity Fair last November, in a posting titled "Rules of Engagement," journalist William Langewiesche began with the Euphrates and enumerated the towns strung along it in Al Anbar province: Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit, Haditha. Of the last, he noted, "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 Al 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."
The opening is typical of Langewiesche, the juxtaposition of telling detail (you stone the dogs) and horrific implication (snipers might kill you); the smooth-flowing, unforced syntax; the straightforward connecting of political dots (before and after) with neither stridency nor euphemism. Vanity Fair, which was perspicacious enough to hire Langewiesche away from his distinguished perch at the Atlantic, has just won a National Magazine Award for "Rules of Engagement," a chronicle of the November 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha by U.S. Marines in the aftermath of a roadside bombing.
Langewiesche is adept at long-form narrative journalism, along with such peers as Seymour Hersh, James Fallows and Robert Kaplan, and he has a nose for reporting on calamity. Readers of his trilogy of pieces written from the ruins of the World Trade Center and collected in "American Ground" may recall his account as unflinching, poignant and ultimately controversial (principally for its hero-busting contention that a few firefighters had been involved in looting).
In his new book, "The Atomic Bazaar," the reportorial stakes are higher than at ground zero or in Iraq. It is about the escape of the nuclear genie from the leaky bottle of international controls, and many facts are necessarily murkier: Information is classified; sourcing is often anonymous; governments dissemble in the interests of policy; evidence can be indicative rather than conclusive. Like "American Ground," the book is assembled from Langewiesche's magazine reporting, this time from disparate locales along real and potential supply lines of nuclear material and processing equipment.
