Dahr Jamail was opposed to the U.S. overthrowing Saddam Hussein. That inspired him to go to Iraq several times from 2003 to the start of 2005 as a freelance journalist to report on how bad the American occupation of the country was. He said he wanted to put Iraqis in the forefront of his stories which he did. Ironically he mostly portrayed them as victims of the U.S. with no agency unless they were in the insurgency. His position on the war also led him to take all kinds of stories he was told at face value even though many were not true. His book suffers massively as a result.
Beyond The Green Zone is dominated by the two battles of Fallujah that took place in 2004. As a result the majority of people he talked to were Sunnis. They felt marginalized after the 2003 invasion because they had lost power and many of them supported the insurgency. You get plenty of those views from the stories that Jamail included. If you read his book it seems like almost every Iraqi supported the militants.
The main problem with his writing comes from the fact that he wanted to portray the occupation of Iraq as bad which led to some wild stories being included. These are endless. In Samarra and Ramadi Iraqis told him that the Americans had cut off all water and electricity to the city as collective punishment after some attacks. One Iraqi said he saw U.S. soldiers walking down a street trying to shoot down power cables to cut off the electricity. The fact that services had collapsed after the invasion and he travelled to other cities where the same thing was happening doesn’t make him question this claim nor stop him from repeating it several times.
The same thing pops up in the coverage of the Fallujah battles. A doctor in Baghdad that was treating casualties from Fallujah told him that the U.S. was using hollow point bullets. The American military is banned from their use. People in Fallujah said the U.S. was power washing the streets of the city to cover up their use of white phosphorus because it was banned from being used against civilians. This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Yes, the U.S. used white phosphorus during the battle but where would they get the hoses and water to wash it all away in the middle of a combat zone?
It quickly becomes apparent that Jamail was purposely seeking out negative stories to include in his reporting and book because of his opinion on the war. During the January 2005 election for instance, he went to a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad where no one he quoted voted. All the people he talked to criticized the American occupation and violence. He wrote that Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa that Shiites should vote or go to hell which was not true. Later on he notes that many Shiites in that area actually did vote but he didn’t include their voices. Why not? Because it would disrupt his narrative that everything the Americans did was bad.
His coverage of the growing violence in Iraq is another example. Whenever he writes about casualties caused by the Americans he goes into detail about what a horror it was, interviews people and calls the incidents atrocities. When dealing with the insurgency there is no comment. He just gives the facts about what happened. This was because he thought the insurgency was a legitimate response to the U.S. occupation so he didn’t want to criticize it.
There are a few positives to Jamail’s writing. For one he captures the anger and resentment early U.S. military tactics created amongst the population. After a bombing for instance the Americans would cordon off the area and search all the surrounding buildings. Usually all the men found were arrested and many would be held for long periods of time with no information given to their families. The rough treatment and screaming troops would also humiliate many. The U.S. did a horrible job securing Iraq for years and these policies only turned the population against them. The inclusion of these stories however does not save the book.
Overall there is no reason to read Beyond The Green Zone. Jamail wanted to show that the U.S. occupation of Iraq was wrong so he included stories that showed that. The author probably didn’t knowingly include false stories but his biases led him to accept anything bad Iraqis had to tell him about the Americans. The result is a long diatribe against the Iraq War that doesn’t add anything to the history of the period.
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2 comments:
Your critique aligns with my own experience with Dahr Jamail.
Around 2003, he visited the offices of Enabling Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). At the time, we were well-known for our critical views on the war's flawed rationale and its early execution, including insufficient post-war planning and rules of engagement that failed to protect civilians or build trust. I suspect Jamail assumed we'd eagerly promote his work from Iraq. Instead, we were immediately skeptical. His superficial knowledge of the country and his apparent disregard for basic journalistic verification, favoring a preconceived narrative, were glaring red flags.
We later reviewed some of his dispatches and found his reporting, as you detail, undermined by relentless bias, where every anecdote was forced to serve a singular anti-occupation thesis, truth be damned.
For a carbon opposite contrast, one need only look to the late Anthony Shadid. While equally unsparing in documenting the suffering and strategic folly, Shadid’s reporting was rooted in profound cultural understanding, linguistic skill, and a commitment to human complexity over political simplicity. He followed the facts to reveal the nuanced agency, hopes, and tragedies of Iraqis from all backgrounds—never reducing them to archetypes. His work possesses a lasting integrity because it resisted the very polemics that define Jamail’s book.
For those who have not yet read it, I highly recommend Shadid's "The American Age, Iraq." It stands out among his most enduring and insightful works. https://granta.com/the-american-age-iraq/
Joel, thank you for sparing fellow Iraq scholars and readers the labor of reading Jamail's screed and for critiquing it so thoroughly. I trust your approach of reading with an open mind while applying your deep knowledge of Iraq to assess accuracy, source verification, and context. As you note, while Jamail's book captures some valid reasons for the collapse of Iraqi trust in the U.S. military presence, his overwhelming bias and journalistic failings make it difficult to trust his reporting or the accuracy of his accounts. In the end, he is guilty of the same cherry-picking that the Bush administration used to make the case for war—merely from the opposite side of the ideological mirror.
Hi Erik,
What strikes me about these kinds of books was that they didn't have to craft a narrative and accept any story that fit it to show that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was bad. There were so many examples early on about how things were going terribly wrong and the Iraqi people were suffering as a result.
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