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ISR Issue 56, November–December 2007


REVIEWS

Occupation as Iraqis live it

Dahr Jamail
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
Haymarket Books, 2007
313 pages $20

Review by SID PATEL

“While the vast majority of the reporting of Iraq was provided by journalists availing themselves of the Pentagon-sponsored ‘embed’ program, I chose to look for stories of real life and ‘embed’ myself with the Iraqi people.”

DAHR JAMAIL is a symbol of courage among independent, left-wing journalists for his decision to venture into Iraq armed with little more than, in his words, “information gleaned via some connections made over the Internet.” His new book follows his work from first arrival in November 2003 to last departure before the elections in January 2005. In between, Jamail produces a vivid and crushing picture of the consequences of the U.S. occupation. The strength of this book is in the quilting together of direct reports and interviews about life, death, and destruction in Iraq, with a heavy reliance on information from Iraqi people.

The unpredictable, daily chaos of extreme violence under occupation is a recurrent theme—from the story of a random beating and robbery carried out by unaccountable Iraqi police, to the inexplicable shootings and demolitions perpetrated by American soldiers against civilians, ostensibly in response to attacks by the resistance. Collective punishment is standard practice—Jamail tells the story of soldiers burning and bulldozing homes near the sites of roadside bomb explosions. An exasperated family in al-Dora, whose farm fields are littered with unexploded ordnance, recounted the response of the U.S. military to their pleas for help: “If you won’t give us a resistance fighter, we are not coming to remove the bombs.”

On top of this baseline level of havoc, Jamail adds detailed descriptions of massive assaults against the cities of Samarra, Fallujah, and Baquba. In particular, his coverage of both the April and November 2004 attacks on Fallujah expose the savage ferocity and disregard for life displayed by the U.S. military command toward the Iraqi people.

During the spring assault, as a medical clinic’s staff tried unsuccessfully to save a young woman and her brother, both shot in the head by American snipers, a doctor explained: “The Americans cut our electricity days ago, so we cannot vacuum the vomit from his throat.” Another boy shot by snipers, and his grandmother, also shot while trying to evacuate him, were dying on beds nearby, she “still clutching a bloodied white surrender flag.” And they were just part of “an endless stream of women and children…shot by U.S. soldiers and…now being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, weeping family members carrying in their wounded.”

The November attack was even worse. A weeping Fallujan refugee was eventually able to tell Jamail: “[The U.S.] bombed my neighborhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them.” A photographer who tried to escape the city, as many Fallujans tried to do, told Jamail, “I decided to swim [across the Euphrates], but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people trying to cross the river.”

After sharing additional stories of maimed civilians and war crimes such as the use of white phosphorus, Jamail draws a weighty comparison:

The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s, Fallujah is our monument of excess and overkill.

Aside from the direct violence, Jamail brings to light the dreadful living conditions produced by the occupation. His descriptions of the water situation in particular produce a visceral reaction. Though Bechtel and other war-profiteers have pocketed billions of dollars for reconstruction work, potable water is still rare. Jamail found that “vast numbers of people…were suffering from cholera, diarrhea, nausea, kidney stones,” and even Hepatitis E, which is “transmitted primarily via ingestion of feces-contaminated drinking water.”

Little wonder when home faucets dispensed “water the color of a wet, dirty sock that smelled of gasoline.” In a jarring comment on both the failure of reconstruction and the U.S. policy of detention and torture, one Iraqi told Jamail that “the Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.”
The book goes beyond eyewitness reporting. For example, it includes vignettes on the history of Samarra and Fallujah, which turn Iraq into a real place with a meaningful heritage. Jamail also analyzes popular opinion in the run-up to the January 2005 elections and explains that the enthusiasm shown by some Iraqis was based on the expectation that the resulting national assembly would produce a timetable for withdrawal and some measure of self-determination—hopes that crumbled soon thereafter.

By way of dozens of statements from ordinary Iraqis, Jamail establishes throughout that the armed resistance is homegrown, driven by the outrages committed by the U.S. military. A sheikh in Samarra said it best: “If the occupation power continues to hurt and humiliate the people here, every man will become a bomb.”

Jamail obtained unique access and perspective in Iraq because he remained independent of the Pentagon. He was present during widespread street celebrations in Fallujah in April 2004 after the resistance forced the U.S. military to withdraw, and he notes that the embedded corporate journalists did not witness this remarkable event because they left with the U.S. military units. In Baghdad, after the announcement by the puppet regime of a new and widely-despised flag for Iraq, Jamail describes how “residents of Adhamiya responded…by hanging countless original green, black, red, and white Iraqi flags all over their neighborhood.” Of course, the U.S. military replied with tanks and soldiers tearing down many of those old flags, but it didn’t end there. “Adhamiya responded by putting up even more.”

Jamail’s commitment to reporting from the standpoint of the oppressed makes Beyond the Green Zone invaluable. He is able to bring the reader along with him as Iraq comes alive through the quotes of Iraqis, the stories of day-to-day life, the shared cups of tea, and, of course, the reports of hell-on-earth created by the occupation.

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