Outrage
In A Time Of Apathy
By Aaron Glantz
14 November, 2007
Inter Press Service
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov
13 (IPS) - Unlike most U.S. journalists who went to Iraq to
cover a war, Dahr Jamail went to try to stop it.
In his new book, "Beyond
the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied
Iraq", Jamail writes of volunteering as a rescue ranger at a Denali
National Park in the U.S. state of Alaska while news of the invasion
and occupation of Iraq played on the radio.
He had to get out of Anchorage,
and in November 2003, Jamail got on a plane to Amman, Jordan, and then,
a few days later, shared a taxi across Iraq's Western desert to Baghdad.
"My going to Iraq was
an act of desperation," he wrote. "I was tormented by the
fact that the government of my country illegally invaded and then occupied
a country that it had bombed in 1991."
Once in Iraq, Jamail set
about reporting the stories of regular Iraqi people. He spent months
in Iraq's hospitals, morgues and mosques. His journalism covers some
of the most mundane, but important, aspects of the U.S. occupation --
like gas lines, checkpoints, and bombed out telephone switching stations.
His stories appeared in numerous outlets around the world, including
IPS.
Most significantly, Dahr
Jamail is perhaps the only U.S. journalist to document firsthand the
human costs of both U.S. sieges of Fallujah, in April and November 2004.
In covering those sieges,
Jamail reported numerous violations of the Geneva Conventions, from
the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorus (which is similar to napalm)
on densely populated civilian areas, to the blocking of relief supplies
from reaching the city, to U.S. military raids into hospitals and shots
fired at ambulances. So many Iraqi people were killed in the assault
on Fallujah, he notes, that the municipal football stadium had to be
turned into a graveyard for the dead.
Visiting the site, he wrote:
"I tried hard to imagine a soccer field back in the United States
being turned into a graveyard -- headstones above ground and buried
shrapnel-shredded bodies underneath, populating a dry field where children
once laughed, ran and kicked soccer balls -- but my imagination failed
me."
For Jamail, the sieges represent
unpunished war crimes and his book is, in part, an effort to push the
perpetrators a little bit closer to justice. The sieges also represent
the climax of his book, which essentially ends when he leaves Iraq for
the final time in February 2005.
"You don't need current
events to know what is going on," he told IPS. "You need to
know what set the conditions for all this."
Since February 2005, there
have been numerous developments in Iraq, including an election, a new
prime minister, and perhaps most importantly, a much trumpeted "troop
surge" which the George W. Bush administration maintains is leading
to "progress" in Iraq, especially in western Anbar Province,
home to Fallujah.
Jamail sees these current
developments through the prism of the U.S. military's previous efforts
there.
"What I see in Anbar
Province is a macro version of what they did in Fallujah after the failed
April siege," he said. "They got their asses kicked. They
couldn't take the city so they fund, arm and back the militias in the
city and leave. So troop deaths go down, they get to pretend that they've
turned over control to the Iraqis and things are getting better. The
reality is now in Anbar they've gone back to funding and backing Sunni
militias on a huge scale and it's a ticking time bomb."
"Beyond the Green Zone"
is the latest entry in a crowded field of books by U.S. journalists
attempting to present the Iraqi side of the war. While the stories that
Jamail tells still rarely make the nightly news or the front pages of
U.S. newspapers, they have been related in a series of books, the most
well-known being "Night Draws Near" by Pulitzer Prize-winning
Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid.
A number of independent journalists,
including this reporter, have also published books on the topic and
several scathing documentary films have been released.
This combination of silence
from the mainstream media and excellent reportage by the independent
press has created a paradox. On one hand, most of the events that Jamail
chronicles in "Beyond the Green Zone" have already been well-documented.
On the other hand, most U.S. citizens remain oblivious to them.
"The media is not even
beginning to show what's really going on in Iraq," Jamail told
IPS, "and so most people here have no idea what's happening."
"People get that the
war is not going well," he said, "but that doesn't show any
of the gravity of the fact that today half the country of Iraq is either
a refugee, in desperate need of emergency care, wounded or dead. What
would the reporting look like if that was the situation here? It would
be off the charts: 'Just look at this catastrophe! People are suffering.
Look what happened to this family's children!' But instead we have this
type of reporting that just kind of touches on the fact that things
are not going so well but it doesn't really show how bad it really is."
Reading as a journalist who
has spent significant time reporting from Iraq under U.S. occupation,
two aspects of "Beyond the Green Zone" particularly hit home.
The first are the book's photos, one of which appears before each chapter:
from a cover image showing a young Iraqi boy standing nervously near
a U.S. tank, to photos of dead bodies in a morgue, and anti-U.S. fighters
holding a rocket launcher, Jamail's photographs ring truer than any
other images this reporter has seen of the Iraq war.
Jamail jokes that his photos
are "amateurish" because they lack the compositional complexity
of more experienced war photographers. But the fact is that the truth
of the Iraq war is not all that complex. The main truth of the war is
death. Jamail's pictures provide that truth simply, showing how the
occupation appears through the eyes of a normal person.
Jamail's section on his return
home is also particularly insightful. After witnessing the second siege
of Fallujah, Jamail returned to the United States in the winter of 2004.
"The differences thrust
in my face on returning home to America were glaring," he wrote.
"There were no checkpoints in the United States. People didn't
have to stop their cars, have guns aimed at them and their children,
get out to be searched, and have their vehicles searched. No military
vehicles roamed the streets, carrying soldiers who aimed their weapons
at powerless civilians who watched them pass. There was mail service
and the phones worked on the first try. You could order take-out and
have it delivered to your door. There were employees of the city who
cleaned the streets, watered the trees and grass, and kept the parks
clean."
This disconnect between the
destruction in Iraq and peace on the home front is universal. You can
hear it from nearly every journalist and soldier who has been to the
war zone. Jamail goes a step further and links U.S. apathy about the
war to its continuation.
"The front lines of
American imperialism were frightening," he wrote. "In Iraq,
there was no hiding the raw, ugly face of corporations profiting from
the blood and suffering caused by the brutal occupation of Iraq. Yet,
back in the United States -- the country that launched the invasion
and now supported the occupation -- people were going about their daily
lives, to my amazement. If news got too intense, people were able to
simply turn it off and take a walk, or go to a movie, or call a friend."
"Beyond the Green Zone"
is an effort to break through that apathy.
"As journalists, it's
our moral obligation to talk about what's actually going on," he
told IPS, "and if people see that and decide to turn off the TV
that's their call, but I've got to do my job. I want to tell people
'Sorry, your government just invaded another country and totally eviscerated
it. Deal with it.'"
IPS Correspondent
Aaron Glantz worked as an unembedded journalist in Iraq from
2003 to 2005. He is the author of the book "How America Lost Iraq"
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2005) and is currently working on his second book
about U.S. veterans of the Iraq war.
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