Veteran Iraq correspondent Anthony Shadid and Los Angeles Times foreign editor Marjorie Miller came to Kresge Auditorium last night to offer their views on the war in Iraq from the point of view of the journalists on the ground.

The presentation was the first part of the Stanford Aurora Forum’s “Iraq: Reframe” series. Shadid, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, spoke at length about his experiences in Iraq from the initial build-up of the war to the beginning of the insurgency. Miller moderated and offered her perspective as an editor.

According to both journalists, neither they nor any of the reporters they encountered in the days leading up to the 2003 start of the war envisioned a long and protracted conflict in Iraq. Shadid claimed that at the onset of the invasion, he thought he would be transferred out of Baghdad within a few weeks as fighting subsided.

However, following the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Hussein regime, as much of the city burned and looting spread rampantly, Shadid said his vision of what he and his colleagues were facing in Iraq began to change.

“You got the sense, then, that maybe there isn’t a plan and maybe they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.

Shadid, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent, covered Baghdad prior to the invasion and personally interviewed average Iraqi citizens. He said that fear and confusion marked the atmosphere on the streets leading up to the war. Journalists like Shadid were unsure of which sources accurately portrayed the feelings of the average Iraqi and which were intended to mislead. As a result, he said, much of the true pre-war climate was lost to journalists.

“You wondered what to listen to, what to hear,” Shadid said. “Often what you hear is exactly what you should write. People were trying to reach out to me, and I don’t think I listened to them as much as I should have.”

“There was definitely a lot of fear that I was getting [from the Iraqis] both on the ground and in the stories I was getting back,” Miller added. “I think most of them were afraid of the unknown.”

Of all of the events surrounding the early weeks of the war, Shadid said that Apr. 9, 2003 — the day that American troops and tanks entered Baghdad — is still his most distinct memory of the war. As a person of Arab descent, Shadid claimed he felt a sense of sadness that Baghdad, one of the most historic and important cities in the Arab world, had been conquered, and that as an American he felt a sense of worry of how America would be able to handle inheriting a city that had been intensely damaged by years of war, sanctions and dictatorship.

“I think most American [reporters] thought, on that day, that it wasn’t going to be an occupation,” he said.

Shadid and Miller expressed similar sentiments regarding the state of correspondent reporting at this stage in the war: that the confusion the journalists were feeling as a result of the lack of credible information made most of them afraid to go against the “safe” story the American government was reporting about the war.

“I think we feared how long and bloody it could be,” Miller said. “No one wanted to let that genie out of the bottle.”

Regarding the current state of reporting on the Iraq War from the field, Shadid and Miller cited a number of factors as contributing to the difficulty in getting the true story across. Miller said that covering events in Iraq is significantly more difficult than it was for her to cover Latin America in the 1980s, citing factionalism as the key distinguishing aspect.

“Not only do you have the job of understanding whether what the government is saying is true or not, but we have to try to understand all these different factions,” she said, adding that journalists are the worst people to try to cover tribal cultures because they live in an “empty space” devoid of religion, tradition and family that is inhabited only by expatriates and other journalists.

Shadid claimed that the most significant reporting he was able to accomplish involved following subjects and events over the course of time, a luxury rarely available in Iraq. He said he was lucky, however, being able to speak Arabic, as it added an extra layer of “texture” to his stories that could have been lost in translation. Miller also touched upon the reporters’ reliance on translators and noted that, out of the approximately 160 journalists and media members who have been killed in Iraq, the majority were Iraqi citizens.

“There’s a degree to which we’ve outsourced reporting that I don’t think we’re honest about,” Miller said. “In some neighborhoods, it is marginally safer for them to go.”

“The idea of a journalist being a noncombatant isn’t the case anymore,” Shadid said. “It looks pretty grim.”

The issue of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq did not come up in the presentation until the question-and-answer session, and neither Shadid nor Miller had much optimism or any solutions to the problem. Shadid stated that violence would get worse if U.S. forces withdrew but that reconciliation is not possible with a U.S. presence still in the country. As to the situation for correspondents and media officials trying to make sense of current American foreign policy in the region, Miller stated that a great deal of confusion and uncertainty still looms throughout and that access is limited.

“The military is saying that explosives are coming in from Iran,” Miller said. “How do we prove it? We think it’s true, but we also thought it was true about weapons of mass destruction, and we didn’t do too well on that one.”