In late 2003, angry at the failure of the U.S. media to
accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi
people, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report on the war himself. Jamail
has spent a total of eight months in occupied Iraq as one of only a few
independent U.S. journalists in the country. He has also reported from
Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. His dispatches have been published in
newspapers and magazines worldwide, and they can be read on his website
(dahrjamailiraq.com).
Dahr Jamail’s book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,
was published in late 2007 (Haymarket Books). Historian Howard Zinn
said, “Jamail does us a great service, by taking us past the lies of
our political leaders, past the cowardice of the mainstream press, into
the streets, the homes, the lives of Iraqis living under U.S.
occupation.”
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Revolution recently talked with Dahr Jamail.
Revolution: You”ve written, “If the people of the United
States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq,
the occupation would already have ended”” What does the occupation mean
to the Iraqi people?
Dahr Jamail: The occupation has meant the total evisceration of the
country. There are between 1.1 and 1.3 million dead. There are at least
4.4 million Iraqis displaced from their homes and, according to Oxfam
International, another 4 million in need of emergency assistance.
Meaning that if they don’t get access to safe drinking water, food, and
medical attention when necessary, they are literally at risk for their
lives. When we consider that Iraq’s overall population was 27 million
five years ago when the war was launched, now it’s just under 25
million; when we add those numbers up, that’s 9 million people out of
25 million people-well over a third of the total population of the
country-are either displaced, in need of emergency aid, or dead. And
this is against a backdrop of between 40% to 70% unemployment. Seventy
percent of the country does not have access to safe drinking water.
There is 70% inflation. The medical infrastructure is in total
shambles. Childhood malnutrition has increased 9% even compared to the
sanctions, a period that killed half a million Iraqi children. That’s
the state of the country today and that’s the result of five years of
occupation. And there’s certainly no reason for us to think that this
is going to change.
Revolution: The U.S. talks a lot about the success of the
large increase in U.S. troops in Iraq that they call the “surge.” What
is the real impact of the “surge,” especially for the Iraqi people?
Jamail: The number of people displaced from their homes has
quadrupled under the “surge.” We”re looking now at the endgame of a
U.S.-backed sectarian strategy of divide and conquer. Sectarian warfare
between the Sunni and Shia has intensified to the point where in
Baghdad, a city of 6 million people, one out of four people is
displaced. And that’s also thanks in large part to the surge in
addition to U.S.-backed death squads and other policies encouraging and
promoting sectarianism.
Also as part of the “surge” we have the U.S. backing the so-called
“Awakening groups,” which now are an 80,000-strong Sunni militia that
is now an effective counterbalance to the Shia-supported government.
One of the goals of the “surge” is supposed to be to promote
reconciliation, but I would argue that it’s having the opposite effect.
Instead of being closer to reconciliation, we are closer to all-out
civil war between various sects and political groups now than we ever
were before the “surge.” And that’s a direct result of U.S. policy.
Revolution: What about U.S. claims that the “surge” has decreased the deaths in Iraq?
Jamail: I would also have to note that last month saw an increase of
33% in Iraqi civilian casualties. So there’s that hard reality to
contradict the propaganda of the Bush administration.
But it is a fact that American troop deaths have decreased. They
started to decrease about seven months ago, at about the same time that
Muqtada al-Sadr put his militia on stand-down. So there’s that factor.
And the Awakening groups I talked about earlier are also another
factor, where the U.S. is literally paying off former resistance
fighters, some of them known Al Qaeda members. They are paying them
$300 a month to stand down and not attack Americans.
So the great irony is that we have once again the U.S. with Al Qaeda
on the U.S. payroll, just as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Revolution: What role has the United States played in the growth of sectarian violence in Iraq?
Jamail: In order to understand the growth of the sectarian violence
in Iraq, you have to go back to Central America in the 1980s when John
Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador-Reagan’s ambassador-to Honduras from
1981 to 1985. It’s widely documented now that he was instrumental in
forming and backing the right-wing death squads there. He couldn’t have
done that without the help of Colonel James Steele, who came on toward
the end of his tenure there and also helped set up these paramilitary
death squads.
Fast forward to Baghdad in December 2004, and who is the U.S.
ambassador there? It’s John Negroponte. And we have a retired Colonel
James Steele, whose title is Counselor for Iraqi Security Affairs. And
these two men again go at it, setting up sectarian-based death squads,
running them through the U.S.-funded Ministry of Information, pulling
them directly from the Shia Mahdi Army and the Badr organization and
the Kurdish Peshmurga, and sending them out to target leadership and
key sympathizers of primarily Sunni resistance. There were already
strains and divides, to be sure, between Shia and Sunni in political
struggles, but the death squads set in motion the wanton sectarianism
and killing, the segregation of the neighborhoods that we”re looking at
the end result of today, where Baghdad is now a city that is set up
primarily by “are you Shia or are you Sunni?”
Revolution: You describe yourself as an “unembedded
journalist.” How do you contrast the role that you play with mainstream
reporters that most people rely on for their coverage of the war?
Jamail: The embedded journalists act as informants for the
government side of the story. You”re always going to get that
perspective and you”re never going to really get the Iraqi side of the
story or even a true view of the U.S. soldier’s side of the story. For
example if you talk about embedded journalism-and I don’t spend too
much time on this because I think it’s pretty clear to people now,
across the political spectrum, that embedded journalists are a fraud
and nothing but propagandists-but I want to underscore what I’m saying
by pointing to the events last weekend [March 13-16] in Silver
Spring, Maryland, where we had the Winter Soldier event put on by Iraq
Veterans Against the War. We had 50 Iraq War veterans and Afghanistan
War veterans up there on stage talking about atrocities and things that
they did while they were in Iraq, showing photos and footage. And
again, with few exceptions, where was the mainstream media? Instead,
reporters ignored it. In the week leading up to Winter Soldier, if you
listened to National Public Radio you heard stories with soldiers in
Iraq talking about how great things were. Where was NPR covering the
Winter Soldier event? That’s my point, that it goes on not just in Iraq
but right back here as well.
Revolution: Where did the policy of embedded journalists come from?
Jamail: You”ve always had embedded reporters. In its current form,
it really started in the 1991 war when the Pentagon, as a means of
information control, set up the embedded program to keep reporters
under their wing and control where they went, what they saw, and how
they reported it. They did a trial run with the embed program. It went
great. Ninety percent of the reporters wanted to come back and do it
again, so the military felt this was great, let’s run with it.
And they did. They greatly augmented it and applied it to this war.
And again with great success, because if you”re going to embed as a
journalist you have to sign forms giving the military control over what
you write, and they”re going to control, of course, what you
photograph, when you take pictures and when you don’t, etc. That’s the
embed program. It’s specifically set up by the Pentagon to control
information, and it’s been quite effective.
Revolution: When the Iraq war started five years ago, you
were working as a ranger and a guide on Mount Denali in Alaska, with no
journalistic experience. How did you end up going to and reporting on
Iraq?
Jamail: I was against the war when it started, and as I watched the
way the media covered the war, I felt completely lied to and betrayed.
I knew enough about journalism to know that what I was seeing was not
journalism, that it was propaganda. I was so outraged that I kind of
went for my own mental health. I felt that I needed to do something
other than the usual things that we are supposed to do to express
dissent, like write letters of concern to our elected representatives.
I felt then and I feel today more than ever that we”ve long since
passed that point. It’s going to take more than letters of concern to
so-called officials to change things here. And I felt that controlling
the information was a very powerful and effective tool, if not the most
powerful, that the government has; and that one thing I could do to
fight against that was to go to report on things. So that’s what I
decided to do.