Review: Jamail's Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

[laststeamtrain]

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"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."

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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."

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"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."


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"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.'"

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40036

[leftchick]

1. excellent

thank you. I listened to him on Democracy Now recently. What a great guy and reporter.

[msongs]

2. wel.....sunnis are iraqis are they not? wink wink nt