War: Every budding war correspondent dreams about the situation while many experienced journalists quietly dread it. You are among a handful of people telling the story of history in the making, and yet you are trapped by a length of cable connected to a television camera on a hotel rooftop with a world of lethal uncertainty just beyond your line of sight, writes Mark Little.
Few reporters know the central contradiction of TV news in an age of war better than Rageh Omaar, and few have tried harder to bypass it, first with the unlearned intimacy of his reporting from Baghdad, and now with Revolution Day. The book's central premise is that the story of Iraq is not about warriors or politicians, but about how civilians endured war and the brutal chaos that preceded it. Too often, Iraq and Saddam were interchangeable terms to the wider world. "For much of these past years," Omaar reminds us, "Iraq's 24 million people were seen only through their leader."
Others have provided more detail about the black-and-white realities of Iraq's disintegration, but Revolution Day is exceptional in communicating the thousand shades of grey that defined life for ordinary Iraqis. Omaar was perhaps better placed than most to communicate the nuances. As the man from the BBC, he was a pillar of the Western establishment. Yet he was fluent in Arabic, and Somali by birth, an outsider in a nation of outsiders.
Ironically, Revolution Day is strongest in its description of the period before its author became an international star. Omaar is bitterly critical of the sanctions imposed on pre-war Iraq, and he argues that the international community may have poisoned the well of democracy by humiliating ordinary, decent Iraqis and persuading them that nothing good could come of foreign intervention. Omaar describes the soul-destroying pettiness of sanctions through the eyes of BBC translator Mohammed Darwish, who was working on a PhD study of the work of James Joyce in the years before the war. In the course of his research, the British Library was forced to refuse his written request for extracts of Ulysses because of the international embargo.
The portrait of Iraqi life under Saddam is vivid, but there is an irritating quality to the language at times. It is a danger for every TV reporter who commits their thoughts to paper; having always relied on potent visual images they tend to find sanctuary in breathless prose. At one point during a vital telephone conversation with an Iraqi official, "the line went dead", leaving Omaar to "race" to the nearest embassy. With the onslaught of American bombing in the first days of war, events become "blinding" and "ear-splitting" and "terrifying" and "shattering" and "hurtling", to such an extent that that you find yourself slightly numb to the reality being described.
The author eventually tires of the superlatives. After "shock and awe", Omaar returns to daily life in wartime Baghdad and the narrative regains an understated elegance. It also introduces the moments of tragic comedy that punctuate desperate lives (when the air-raid sirens finally broke down, the residents of Baghdad relied on the howling of wild dogs in the streets who picked up the sonic waves of approaching missiles).
Ultimately, in his chilling account of the US advance on Baghdad, Omaar is both observer and participant, as he and his colleagues fight to save the life of a colleague, Taras Protyusk, fatally injured when an American tank shell ploughs into the Palestine Hotel.
In an otherwise credible description of the media experience, Omaar does slip up. Contrasting American and Iraqi treatment of reporters, he says that when the war ended no foreign journalists had been killed or injured by Iraqi forces. This is hard to reconcile with the fact that "embedded" reporters Christian Liebig and Julio Anguita Parrado died in an Iraqi missile attack south of Baghdad, and that BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan was killed by an Iraqi mine in northern Iraq.
Occasionally, Revolution Day delivers sweeping generalisations without providing enough credible witnesses or adequate context. Without doubt Omaar brings us important truths about war, but too often he presents them as the whole truth. The reality is that "war is whatever piece of dirt you are sitting on", as an American "embed" dryly observed - and the author's piece of dirt was very limited at times.
All this must be balanced against Omaar's considerable achievements. With characteristic humanity, he proves that our perception of conflict often bears little relationship to the reality as lived by the people directly affected. He also exposes the contradictions facing a new generation of TV reporters. Too often, war journalism is shaped by the preconceptions of the audience at home rather than the "facts on the ground", and as we strive for "the latest" we often miss "the context".
Rageh Omaar deserves credit for trying to bridge that gap, even if he does not quite reach the other side.
Mark Little is a presenter of RTÉ's Prime Time programme. His latest book, Zulu Time: When Ireland Went to War, has just been published by New Island
Revolution Day: The Human Story of the Battle for Iraq. By Rageh Omaar
Viking/Penguin Books, 243pp. £17.99