Beyond the Green Zone is a powerful, shocking, and meticulous account the US invasion of Iraq told from the perspective that has been largely neglected by US corporate media: its victims.
The US military, in the wake of Vietnam, considered the media to be a great threat to its ability to wage offensive wars of counterinsurgency and occupation. When the public is fully informed of the atrocities that quite naturally follow wars pitting modern armies against grass roots, popularly supported resistance movements, domestic outrage and anti-war sentiment quickly erodes the political foundation of the war. In the past 20 years, among the efforts to ensure what happened in Vietnam did not happen again, the Pentagon developed "embedding", a most pernicious assault on journalistic integrity, to ensure information about the war was restricted US political and military leaders perspective. Embedded journalists rely on the soldiers around them for their lives, causing them to form unprofessional relationships and abandon the responsibility of holding authorities to account that should define the profession of journalism in a functioning democracy. They see only what military authorities want them to see, and fail to independently examine assertions or cover perspectives from members of the society in which the military is operating.
That is why this Jamail and his work are so critically important. Working as a park ranger in Alaska, he was struck by the contrast between the way international news agencies in Britain, France, and the Arab world and the US corporate media were covering the lead up to the war. Assertions by the US government relating to the non-existent WMD, links between Saddam to Al-Qaeda/9-11, and other false claims were critically examined and debunked by foreign press, but taken on faith and passed as truth and trumpeted by the war cheerleading US media. Outraged that his country was being lied into a war and determined to help get the truth out, Jamail scraped some money and equipment together and set off to Iraq to independently report the consequences of the war.
Jamail spends his time in country visiting residential neighborhoods, rural farms, hospitals, and various cities around Iraq. He interviews countless locals, farmers, resistance leaders and fighters, and the occasional Iraqi authority or US soldier. Much of his reporting is from Baghdad, but some of the most powerful section of the book were trips he made to the city of Fallujah during the Marines' two attempts to destroy the resistance movement there, at massive cost to civilian life. The great risk he took to tell this suppressed truth is beyond admirable. Beyond the risk of random carbombings, kidnappings, and other daily Iraqi occurrences, unembedded journalists in Iraq were sometimes targets of US military detention and even assassination (see the killings of Al Jazeera journalists, documented elsewhere).
Jamail's accounts reveal the extent to which the US military establishment blatantly lied about the nature of the resistance movement, the scope of military operations, and the extent of civilian casualties. He frequently juxtaposes pictures and first hand accounts he documents with a dishonest military press release, which is uncritically accepted by the establishment media.
Overall, Jamail paints a horrendous, heart wrenching picture of the utter chaos and destruction that has been unleashed on 27 million innocent people, already suffering from decades of US sponsored genocidal sanctions and brutal US backed dictatorship. One of the elements most lacking in the US national discourse is empathy, and it's difficult not to be overwhelmed with anger and sadness at the Jamail's endless accounts of 8 hour gas lines, lack of electricity, lack of medical supplies, use of illegal cluster bombs and white phosphorous on civilians, intentional sniping of women and children, intentional firing upon ambulances, night raids, and the general sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and terror that pervades the lives of ordinary people throughout the country.
On top of the sheer horror and scale of the crimes perpetrated by the US in Iraq, Jamail touches on the obscene levels of corporate profiteering and corruption. Bechtel, despite receiving almost 3 billion in reconstruction money, failed to deliver the medical facilities, electricity, and clean water it promised. The US and Iraqi puppet authorities amended Iraqi law to permit foreign companies to invest in Iraq without local partnership, without hiring Iraqis, and to freely take any profits out of the country. What kind of reconstruction is structured to exclusively benefit foreign companies at the expense of the local population?
After reading this book, it's quite easy to understand why such a massive resistance movement developed in Iraq. I fail to understand how anyone in the US can act as if Iraqis should be happy to have our armies in their homeland, murdering innocent people with abandon. Human beings everywhere chafe and revolt under foreign occupation. Our ideology pretends that we are freedom incarnate, and constitutionally incapable of aggressive war and occupation, but that is preposterous. The US establishment's attempts to write these people off as terrorists are absurdly hypocritical, as this country was founded in exactly that kind of nationalistic grass roots resistance to foreign power.
The time period covered by Jamail's coverage in the country mainly ended before the sectarian conflict really developed to horrific proportions, and I would have liked to hear more about that, but I'm sure there are other sources for that.
Upon perusing other reviews, I noticed some people accusing him of 'bias' or questioning his journalism because it did not flow through an editor. I find these claims absurd. Given the extremely well documented failures of US corporate media, with their huge number of employees, editors, and resources, to do basic fact checking on the claims of the US government and military, and their willingness to spread the lies and propaganda that started this war, criticizing Jamail for not having the infrastructure they have is a weak argument. I hope these people hold the corporate media to the same level of skepticism and treat everything that comes out of such blatantly dishonest institutions as suspect. Many of the incidences Jamail documents have been investigated by international human rights organizations as well, whose accounts corroborate his. Furthermore, if even 10% of what he said was true, if only 10% of those women and children were brutally murdered, the US occupation of Iraq would still be an unconscionable travesty of justice that that can't be tolerated by a civilized world.
Jamail is an angry citizen holding his government to account by allowing the victims of a war to share their suppressed stories. The US military and their corporate media lapdogs have a well documented record of lying, murdering, committing war crimes, and advancing corporate interests above human interests. Who will you believe?
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Hans Schwinger
Freiheit und Demokratie aus USA? Nein, danke.
Reviewed in Germany on February 23, 2008
