At the end of this extraordinary, succinctly written book, written by the Wall Street Journal’s deputy chief for Middle East and Africa, Farnaz Fassihi, an Iranian-American, tells of hearing over and over again an Iraqi response to the long war: “Until now, we are still waiting.” Fassihi concludes, “What are they waiting for, I wonder. Perhaps just for an ordinary day.”

One of the first casualties in wartime are ordinary days, the kind most people inhabit. Fassihi, who ran the Wall Street Journal’s Baghdad bureau from 2003 to 2006 and once worked as a reporter for the Providence Journal, makes friends with and follows the disrupted lives of her Iraqi staff, translators and guards; Sabah Nasser’s Christian family; Amal al-Khudeiry, who has run a gallery of Iraqi art and culture for years, and many others.

We come to know and care for these people as Fassihi interviews sheikhs and imams, politicians and Islamic fundamentalists, clerics and various culprits. And to understand a bit of the Iraqi culture: their longing for a father figure, their sense of fate and destiny, and their utter disbelief in the American ability to restore infrastructure, bring security and carve out something which may or may not resemble democracy.

For many Iraqis, Americans are not liberators but occupiers, Fassihi tells us. Their mismanagement staggers the imagination, particularly of those who actually believed in America’s beneficence and organizational skills. Staged elections only deepen ancient divisions between Sunnis and Shiites. An election itself has nothing to do with establishing a functioning democracy. In fact when the Shiites triumph, it leads to civil war, kidnappings, beheadings, various militias like the Wolf Brigade, assassinations and utter bloody chaos.

What hurts the most amid America’s attempts to simply make a country function are the people Fassihi meets and befriends. Sabah Nasser’s family deteriorates, separates, splinters and flees from their ancestral home. The only sons of the two hotel receptionists (where Fassihi holes up) are kidnapped, murdered and blown up. Nineteen-year-old Hayder Jabbar dies bleeding in his father’s arms. Eighteen-year-old Ali Khuteer is blown to pieces as a suicide bomber heads for the hotel.

Moderates like Shiekh Khamis al-Hassnawi of the Bu-Issa tribe in Fallujah are marginalized by cutthroats, gangs, Sunnis seeking revenge and mad clerics preaching their violent Friday sermons. Headless corpses are flung into the dust in front of their homes. The photos of American abuse in Abu Ghraib — widespread, according to the Red Cross, not just the bad acts of a few zealots — stun the Iraqis, as did the looting the American troops allowed just after the fall of Saddam.

The horrors that create impenetrable grief strike down ordinary people, and their stories will catch in your throat — as they did in Fassihi’s.

samcoale@cox.net