“There is much to Iraqi sentiment besides Saddam’s regime.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post Islamic Affairs Coorespondent Anthony Shadid expounded on this observation during his West Lecture Hall address Thursday. “Seeing a people through the lens of oppression blinds us to nuance,” he said.

Shadid covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq for the Post and has been working in the Middle East for some time. He has reported from Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories for the Associated Press and The Boston Globe in addition to the Post.

In the lecture, Shadid recounted the stories of several ordinary Iraqis he had met during his visits to the country. These included a copper merchant who described Iraqis as “prisoners of Saddam’s regime” but felt “no friendship with the U.S.” There was also a bookseller who was angry with Saddam over the invasion of Kuwait but couldn’t understand the U.S. “obsession” with Iraq and a former diplomat from Mosul who lamented “we complain about things here all the time but that doesn’t mean we have sympathy for foreign nations.”

Through these examples and others, Shadid portrayed the Iraqi people as relieved to be rid of Saddam but ever trepidatious or intensely angered by the American occupation. He felt that voices like these had been lacking from the accounts by reporters working in Iraq before the war, who tended to focus more on officialdom.

Shadid said he felt that reporting had improved since the official end of fighting but admitted that “we don’t get the full picture out of Najaf. There haven’t been a lot of stories out of [Shia cleric Moqtada] al-Sadr’s compound.”

He attributed much of this to the dangers of reporting in Iraq today.

“There was a time when I didn’t even think twice about going to Najaf,” he said. “Today it’s much more dangerous. I would never go to Fallujah. You’re just asking to get killed there.”

Shadid, a Lebanese-American, felt that the portrayal of Islam in the American media was incomplete.

“You see headlines sometimes like, ‘Where is Islam today?’” he said. “You would never see that with Christianity, it’s far too broad a topic for that. You can write it but it doesn’t make for very good journalism.”

He also discussed his “agnostic” views on the controversial arab TV network Al-jazeera.

“Their reporters have shown remarkable courage and taken risks that western journalists would never take,” he said.

He was troubled by the networks tendency to conflate the situation in Iraq with that in Palestine and said they did have a tendency to exagerate at times but he did not feel that the distortion was worse than western networks such as Fox News.

Despite the increasingly dangerous nature of Iraqi reporting, Shadid said he was troubled by instances of reporters arming themselves or hiring armed escorts.

“One reporter I know went to talk to some militiamen and showed up in an armored vehicle wearing a helmet with two flak jackets in the back seat and two armed guards,” he said. “They kidnapped him, of course.”

Isolation was a major theme of Shadid’s talk. The isolation extends to both the journalists from the regions they are covering through official interference or fear and the isolation that the American authorities faced from the Iraqi population.

“There’s been an overemphasis on the ethnic groups,” he said. “The way that the Coalition Provisional Authority tried to divide the cabinet positions along strict ethinc lines — Shia, Sunni, Kurd — has only deepened the ethnic divisions in the country.”

Shadid will be returning to Iraq for the Post in November in order to cover the country’s elections which he predicts will probably have to be delayed for security reasons.

His new book, Night Draws Near, will be released next year and will focus on his experiences reporting in Iraq and personal stories from some of the people he met there.

His lecture was sponsored by the Politics and Gender and Women’s Studies departments and was the first event of this semester’s Middle East Lecture and Film Series.