FOOTLOOSE, BUT NOT FANCY FREE, by PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS

Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman's Journey through Iraq, By Hadani Ditmars

Raincoast, 261 pages, $24.95

As the presence of Iraq in prime-time news ebbs and flows like the Arabian Sea, the enormous tragedy of its people deepens into what often appears to be a bottomless pit of suffering and misery, all the more harrowing and heartrending for its being inflicted unnecessarily and callously.

Meanwhile, a report to the United Nations gives us a glimmer of the dispiriting truth: that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam, since the numbers suffering from malnutrition have doubled since the Ba'ath regime fell. Under the Geneva Conventions -- the international laws regarding warfare -- the United States has been solely responsible for the welfare of Iraqis for the past two years. It is no exaggeration to say that the invading army has shown concern only for the welfare of Iraq's oil industry.

Those Iraqis with whom I am still in contact -- a reasonably broad cross-section of the population -- cite disturbingly similar complaints: There is insufficient food; the supply of electricity is erratic; the water is not potable; there are no jobs; there is no security outside the Green Zone; and most believe the Americans are striving to foment civil war in order to have a reason for remaining, if not in Baghdad, then in the vast network of bases they have built out in the desert. Even political enemies and victims of the Ba'athist regime's inhuman cruelties say they would rather have Saddam back than remain under the U.S. boot heel.

If, indeed, Iraq was ever a political issue, it is no longer one. It is a human tragedy, comparable only with history's greater nightmares. To be a teenager in Iraq today is to have known nothing but war, deprivation and devastation. Scarcely a day has passed during the last 14 years when U.S. warplanes did not bomb some part of the country. The most advanced and westernized of all Arab nations has truly been -- as former president George H. W. Bush promised -- "bombed back into the pre-industrial era."

Even if Saddam had been a greater threat to U.S. security than my cat (and he was not), even if he had masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks (he did not), there would still be no justification for the appalling suffering inflicted upon Iraq's civilian population. More than one million of them -- mainly women and children -- have died as a direct result of U.S. actions since 1991. More than one million.

When, I wonder, are we Earthlings going to realize the enormity of this crime? What does it take for us to put aside religious and ethnic prejudices and see that the average Iraqi hurts, hungers and mourns exactly as we do. The average Iraqi also views Canadians as fair, decent and honest people, the kind who would be welcomed, trusted as peacekeepers and shepherds of a nascent democracy. In my experience, this level of respect was accorded no other nation.

But the average Iraqi is not someone whose voice is exactly very familiar as we surf the tumultuous tides of prime-time news. If all Canadian journalist Hadani Ditmars's first book did was to correct this egregious absence, providing a forum for the disenfranchised and voiceless, it would be a wholly remarkable and exemplary document, mandatory reading on the subject. The fact that Dancing in the No-Fly Zone goes so much farther than this, and is written with elegance, wisdom and compassionate humour, makes it a unique triumph and a somewhat daunting debut, indeed.

Ditmars is no parvenu, though; her byline often appears in this newspaper and in such stellar international publications as The New York Times, the London Independent, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Time and even -- she is after all, as she admits, a "chick" -- in Vogue.

The fact that we have never met is also somewhat remarkable, since her visits to Iraq, dating back to 1997, always intersect with my own so neatly that one of us is always taking up the chronicle of Iraq's progress where the other leaves off. We even appear to have had some of the same Ba'athist Information Ministry minders inflicted upon us; and we share a few acquaintances, although Ditmars obviously attracts a more refined class of Iraqi than I do. It is not facetious to say that my own books on the country could have been subtitled A Guy's Journey Through Iraq, for the accessibility to experience available across most of the Middle East for one gender is vastly different from that generally available to the other.

Where Ditmars is a magnet for dashing young cellists and glamorous (if slightly shady) millionaire entrepreneurs, I used to do well with sexually omnivorous sadists from the torture department of Saddam's tiered Babel of secret police, and I also had my fair share of importuning tribal entrepreneurs specializing in the smuggling of drugs, guns and virgins. We'd make a great team, I often mused, while reading her book in one long, enthralling session that evoked many tears, much bittersweet laughter and a lot of presque vu (if such an expression exists, since it could not have been déjà vu.

Ditmars's numerous visits to Iraq are skillfully woven into the larger tapestry of her last visit, in September, 2003, six months after the invasion and occupation. I had deserted my watch the previous month. Where one would have to read both my books to gain a perspective on the difference between Saddam's Iraq and that of Bush II, Dancing in the No-Fly Zone gives it to you in one irreducibly concise and balefully evocative volume.

Yet the conclusions are inescapably identical. The raw statements that began this review are given a human face. "The old fear of being informed on," Ditmars writes, "had given way to a more general anxiety about the safety of walking outside to buy a loaf of bread." As an old friend tells her, "We don't know who to be afraid of. . . . Once there was only one Saddam -- now there are dozens." The author poignantly concludes, "Twenty years of war and sanctions, of waiting for some Godot-like liberation, and only this." The sentence clutches my heart like a dead man's claw.

While I have always had as much access to women in the upper echelons of Iraqi society as Ditmars, I truly envy her ability to penetrate freely the closed world of working-class and tribal women, forever off-limits to a male outsider. It is in the voices of such women that one hears a bottom-line, unvarnished reality, a bedrock truth that the husbands or brothers of such women would never utter, whether out of pride or fear or both. In their unembellished statements is truly found that still, sad music of humanity, the plangent chords that tell of malnourished breasts unable to produce milk for newborn babes; of daughters and sisters forced into prostitution so their families can have bread upon the table; of husbands driven to violent despair by their own inability to provide; of brothers contemplating employment in the only boom business that Iraq can now boast -- security services, where the pay is $5 a day and you have a one-in-three chance of staying alive longer than six months.

Perhaps most tragically ironic of all diabolical realities in the new Iraq is, as Ditmars is forced to see numerous times, that the rights of Iraqi women -- notably upheld and advanced under Saddam -- are now gradually being eroded as Shia versions of Shariah Islamic law begin to replace the old civil codes. More than the insulated rich, who can escape whenever they choose, these peasant women, upon whose bent shoulders and sheer will power rest the shattered flagstones of Iraqi society's foundations, know that the bleak present augurs for them only a far bleaker and more repressive future, one in which there will be stonings for adultery, beatings for anything at all, and where their hard-won rights will dwindle down to one right: that of serving a man within whose home their status will be scarcely more than that of chattels.

Ditmars has no illusions about the increasingly theocratic course a Shia-dominated Iraqi government will take, just as she understands the 30 years of Sunni abuse that will be the root cause of any Islamist revenge upon the old elites. Most Iraqis will admit that, when it comes to killing other Iraqis, Saddam and the United States cannot take all the credit. But as W. H. Auden wisely observed: "I and all school children learn/ That those to whom violence is done/ Do violence in return."

I hope she is wrong about the Shia-Sunni gulf widening into a terror. But right and wrong are largely irrelevancies in a book that echoes with so many real voices from a land whose tribulations so far exceed the imaginations of any who have not been there that its pages offer the next best thing to an actual holiday in hell. I don't know many men who would visit Iraq in a tour group, let alone solo, but Hadani Ditmars is the only woman I am aware of with so much iron in her soul that an incoming cruise missile wouldn't prevent her from finishing both her coffee and her copy.

Anyone who cares about the truth of this squalid invasion owes her an enormous debt of gratitude for what is one of the few great books written about it, and for the grace she invariably displays under a pressure I understand all too well myself. Bravo!