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Tavis: Anthony Shadid is an award-winning reporter for 'The Washington Post' who's written extensively about Iraq. Last year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his dispatches from Iraq. His latest book is called "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War". He joins us tonight from Washington. Anthony, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Anthony Shadid: Pleasure to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. Last week, of course, much news was made by the Saudi Foreign Minister who suggested that Iraq was moving toward disintegration. Is he right about that?

Shadid: You know, that's the sense I have as a reporter in Iraq for the past couple of years and I think at this point that it's not a stretch to say there's actually a civil war underway in Iraq at this point. When you look at the level of violence, when you look at the rivalries, when you see the factions in play, if it's not a civil war, it's a semblance of civil war, and there is a great threat that it could intensify and become worse.

Tavis: In laymen's terms, help me understand and those watching understand what this civil war is about. We know what the Civil War here was fought about, but what are they fighting a civil war about inside of Iraq?

Shadid: Well, I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there. I think traditionally people look at this as pitting the Kurds, an ethnic group in northern Iraq, against the Sunni Arabs who have traditionally been the power in Iraq, against the Shiite Arabs who are the majority in Iraq. I think it's a traditional notion that this is pitting Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds against each other.

I guess my sense is that it's a little bit more complicated than that, that it's really rivals within each community that are perhaps where you see the real fault lines emerging, rivals within the Shiite community, rivals within the Sunni community. Even the two parties that represent the Kurds, there is some friction there. If we see this worsening, those are the fault lines we'll probably see this becoming exacerbated.

Tavis: The Bush White House line with regard to the escalating violence in Iraq is that we are winning. Their spin, of course, is that, when you see this violence continue to go on in Iraq, they don't want to have democracy in this country, so the escalating violence means that we are winning, it means that democracy will take hold there one day. Is the president right about that? Is that what escalating violence really means in Iraq?

Shadid: You know, I guess if the argument is that we're winning right now, I'm not sure what constitutes victory, to be honest. I don't think the insurgency is weakening necessarily. I think the insurgency, or at least a current within that insurgency, has a notion of what victory is and that is to create the perception of failure, to create the perception of anarchy and chaos and disorder, and I think that's why we see such carnage going on in Baghdad. There's a certain truth to this logic. It's a brutal logic and it's a devastating logic, but there is a certain truth to the logic. You know, these spectacles that, you know, keep on demanding higher death tolls in order to keep grabbing attention. There is this perception of failure out there, I think, right now among Iraqis and other parts of the region.

Tavis: Before I get to some of these stories -- and I want to get directly to some of the people, some of the individuals, some of the human beings that you talked to and talk about and write about in this book -- before I do that, though, if there is an answer to this that is not so universal that it doesn't apply, tell me what the grievance is or grievances are that the people of Iraq have with us. Clearly, they couldn't have been happy with Saddam, but they also clearly have grievances with us. What are those grievances?

Shadid: Well, I'll tell you, a lot of people talk about why there seems to be kind of a, you know, reluctance to embrace democracy or freedom or these ideals that we sometimes call western. I never read it that way in Iraq as a reporter. The people I talked to and the people I got to know, it's that the daily life becomes so overwhelming, that the challenges of daily living become overwhelming. A lack of electricity, a lack of water, crime, the violence that lurks everywhere almost. You know, one family I know, they were dealing one day with four car bombs going off in front of their house.

I think these challenges are so overwhelming, at times even suffocating, that politics at a certain level becomes an indulgence. So the frustration is with us, I think, at that level. The frustration is that expectations were so high. People remember that President Bush promised that the condition of Iraqis would dramatically improve and those conditions haven't necessarily improved when we talk about these day-to-day living conditions.

Tavis: At this point, before, again I get to these individuals, do these people by and large see us -- that age-old question -- as liberators or as an occupying army at this stage?

Shadid: You know, I think people see us as both liberators and occupiers, but I think more importantly, they see us as a catalyst for consequences that I don't think a lot of people anticipated. When I say catalyst for consequences, I mean consequences like religious revival, the growing militancy in the country, a hardening of lines between Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. These forces are at this point really reshaping the country and perhaps beyond the control of the Americans or even forces within Iraq itself.

Tavis: Let me throw some names at you and let me apologize to our viewers and to you. I know you'll come behind me and correct me, but I'm going to do the best I can with some of these pronunciations and you tell the story. But there's some fascinating stories in this book about the people, as the subtitle suggests, "Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War." Tell me the story of your relationship with Shala.

Shadid: Shala?

Tavis: Yes.

Shadid: Dr. Shala was a doctor, a Shiite doctor, that I met in Baghdad. She was a fascinating character to me and she became a friend. I thought her memories of what Baghdad once was and what Baghdad has become were one of the most powerful stories she ever told me. I remember one. It was during the Iran-Iraq war, an eight-year war in the 1980's, a million dead and wounded on both sides. If somebody asked me today why Iraq is the way it is, you know, I would point back to that event, that Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988.

Dr. Shala talks about this one memory she has as a schoolgirl. She was called out of her classroom. Iranian prisoners of war were paraded around the streets and people were encouraged to throw shoes at them, to spit at them, to shout insults at them. She says, even as a schoolgirl, she realized that the Baghdad she knew a few years earlier would never return, that this war was changing Baghdad forever.

Tavis: There's another story in here of a young man, I believe, who was accused of being a United States informer. You tell the story. You know the story I'm talking about?

Shadid: I do. This was early on, you know, when the insurgency was just beginning. I think there was a lot of talk back then about how people were, you know, helping the American military root out these insurgents, you know, cooperating and giving information. I saw this as kind of the flip side of that, you know, the more menacing side to what was happening with informers.

He helped the American military pinpoint suspects in this place called Thuluya. Dozens, I think even hundreds, were arrested. Three people died in the process and the village leaders said to this man's father, this man Sabah, they told this father that he had to kill his son or the village leaders would kill the rest of his family. His father begged for an alternative. They offered no alternative and, in the end, he was forced to kill his son. He told me a line that I don't think I'll ever forget as a reporter. He said as I sat with him a few weeks after he was forced to do this, he said to me that, "Not even the prophet Abraham had to kill his son." He said there was no other choice.

Tavis: Is it Karima who was this impoverished single mother in the book you write about?

Shadid: Karima is somebody I met during the invasion pretty early on. I think it was the first week into the invasion. I was in Baghdad and I was working on a story about an Iraqi family who had sent their son to fight with the Iraqi army and her oldest son, Ali, had gone to an anti-aircraft battery in Mosal in northern Iraq. I met Karima at that time. I stayed in touch with her and her family. She was a mother of eight children. She was very poor. She'd been selling gum from a canvas mat before the invasion. I stayed with them through the aftermath in the months and years that followed.

Karima, in a way, to me was always kind of an Iraqi everyman, the way she saw things going on around her, her desire for just a sense of security, a sense of stability, a sense of safety. It was often a window on how these daily challenges, like I mentioned, this getting day-to-day, dealing with electricity, water, sewage, these types of things, become so overwhelming and how they dominate life in so many different ways.

Tavis: You also write about a former diplomat, a former official in the Bath party, who was sharing his feelings with you about how he was going to stand up for his country, but not for Saddam. I think that feeling was pretty widespread?

Shadid: You know, I didn't really appreciate it until I met -- this was, again, I met him during the invasion. It was an incredible gesture of hospitality. They invited me to share lunch with them during the invasion. I went over there and we ended up talking through the entire day, him and his family. They were a Sunni Muslim family and they were talking about how much they resented Saddam, how much they disliked Saddam. They blamed Saddam for all the disasters that had befallen Iraq, but they said that hating Saddam doesn't mean we're going to welcome the Americans. There's one thing to hate Saddam. There's another thing to ask for an occupation. I think that was one of the first times that I got a sense that it might be a little more complicated than I thought we expected when the occupation actually did begin a few weeks later.

Tavis: I tried to pull out these five or six examples of the stories of the people of Iraq because that's exactly what this book is about. I wanted the audience to get some sense of the lives and the struggles and the travails of these ordinary people in Iraq. I did that in part because, beyond sharing those stories, I'm curious as to whether or not you think that Americans by and large might see this invasion even more fundamentally different than we do if we were more connected to the stories of the people who've been harmed, and these are the kinds of stories that we don't get in our media every day for obvious reasons.

Shadid: You know, I think there's a couple of levels to that. I mean, this book was always to me about how ordinary people get through the times that aren't ordinary. You know, I don't think we appreciate what Iraq was before the invasion. I don't think we appreciated what it had gone through. The war I mentioned with Iran, a decade of sanctions that basically wiped out the middle class in the 1990's, one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. I don't think we understood what country we were entering when we did enter it.

Like I said, another level -- and as a reporter, you always search for that kind of thing that, you know, joins us, that common human experience. Time and again, I saw that happening in Baghdad during the invasion, during the occupation, the emotions I was hearing, the feelings people were talking about, the sentiments that were being expressed, were kind of universal in a way. I think it's an important thing to note sometimes that, you know, all those experiences seem so different in so many respects. There is a universal sentiment here that I think a lot of people understand or will understand.

Tavis: Speaking of universal sentiment and that universal human emotion and human feeling that we all have to deal with around issues like these, is there a lesson, do you think, that the American people can learn from the Iraqi people?

Shadid: That's a good question and I think if there's one trait that just strikes me time and again, you know, having lived in Iraq for quite a while and having met these people, is that there is a remarkable resilience that I found in that country. I mean, when you look back at this past twenty or thirty years like we're talking about, war, sanctions, devastation, deprivation, there is this resilience that allows Iraqis to get through it. I mean, they do get past it year after year after year and even today with the level of violence that goes on everywhere, especially in Baghdad. You do see people making it to the next day. Resilience is being tested, there's no question. I think in some ways it's waning, but it's still there and it's a remarkable testament to the strength of the people there.

Tavis: As is this book. Anthony Shadid is the winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His new book is "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War". Anthony, nice to have you on the program. All the best to you.

Shadid: A pleasure. Thank you.

Tavis: My pleasure as well. Up next on this program, from the critically acclaimed new film, "A History of Violence", actress Maria Bello. Stay with us.