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Monday’s news from Iraq was typically
dismal: A suicide bomber killed five
American soldiers in Baghdad. Another
one took out three other U.S. soldiers along
with a Sunni sheik who had sided with the
U.S. in Diyala province, while a car bomb
killed two Iraqis in the Kurdish north.
That’s on top of the dozens killed in last
week’s bombing of a Shiite business district
in Baghdad.
On National Public Radio on March 10,
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith said that a
week or two of violence means little compared
to the gains of last year’s U.S. surge.
But it’s impossible to read Dahr Jamail’s
new book, Beyond the Green Zone, and
not laugh out loud at the positive spin.
For five years, the White House and
Pentagon have been concocting a tale of
terrorists on their last legs and progress
toward democracy in Iraq. Jamail, an
unembedded American freelancer who
first went to Iraq in November of 2003
and returned three times over the course
of 2004, tells a very different story – one
that every American who supports the war
needs to read, but likely won’t, because of
the very choice of Jamail’s words.
A written account and photo album
of the writer’s travels and interviews
while in the country, Beyond the Green
Zone correctly calls the U.S. “liberation”
of Iraq what it is – an occupation that’s
overseen not by a “budding democracy,”
but a puppet government. In place of
“terrorists,” Jamail, a Texan of Lebanese
descent, uses the apt word “resisters.”
These resisters, he says, have multiplied
exponentially in the wake of the censorship,
mosque raids, arrests, torture, and killings
Iraqis face. Then there are the collective
punishments meted out to entire towns,
such as cutting off electricity or plowing
down crops. Throughout the book, he documents
how U.S. troops have subjected Iraqi
civilians to these indignities again and again
since the invasion.
And Al Qaeda? Yes, some foreign fighters
are there. But as Jamail demonstrates,
it is largely native Iraqis who have turned
against the U.S., thanks to their negative
treatment, not the least of which is U.S.
contractors like Bechtel leaving them with
unclean drinking water, little electricity, and
no jobs, much less “freedom.”
In the city of Fallujah, when a crowd
of Iraqis protested the U.S. military’s use
of a school as a base of operations, Jamail
recounts that soldiers fired on the crowd,
galvanizing a resistance that would lead
to two sieges of the city in April and November
of 2004 – some of which Jamail
saw firsthand. In the second siege, he
writes, U.S. soldiers shot at ambulances,
killed thousands of civilians, occupied the
main hospital, bombed another, refused
to allow medical supplies into the city or
let residents out, and used cluster bombs
and flesh-burning white phosphorous in
violation of the Geneva Conventions.
All because the Fallujans didn’t want
U.S. soldiers controlling their city. “Why are
we called terrorists?” one of many Iraqis
asks Jamail. “This is our country. These are
foreign army tanks in our streets killing our
people. We fight against this and we are
called terrorists? They are the terrorists.”
It is, to say the least, a painful read– one
that jumps around at times or assumes
the reader knows an as-yet unintroduced
piece of information. Jamail also uses similar
quotes over and over to hammer home that
Iraqis want the occupation to end. But, then,
that’s the point of a page-turning book that
lays bare the absurdities of a war that most
Americans simply turn off each day with
the TV news. |
