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.
Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic
No comments:
Post a Comment