Book review: Unembedded in Iraq
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books, 2007
This book brilliantly captures the horrors of being caught up in conflict. Scorning the compromising position of an embedded journalist, Dahr Jamail travelled Iraq to report on a subject often neglected by the mainstream media: daily life in Iraq.
Discovering a country occupied by unwanted foreign powers, Beyond The Green Zone depicts Iraqis such as Khali Ahmed, who lost three of his family after American soldiers raided the wrong house and were forced to cover up, and Hassan Mehdi Mohammed, who told Jamail that eight out of 10 people in his village were unemployed.
The inclusion of photos at the beginning of each chapter provides a visual reminder of the dangers. For me the most poignant photo was of an ambulance with its door open and bullet holes in the windscreen, after American snipers shot at it. Clearly, the occupation is not fixing Iraq, despite the purring words of Gordon Brown and the brash phrasing of George Bush.
One of the reasons why his book is so important is the sheer breadth of interviews. As Jamail is not in the presence of the US Military, Iraqis are free to speak their mind. Every time he visits a house, he manages to interview four or five people within it, not just one spokesperson. Beyond The Green Zone is forensic in its detail when describing the injuries of citizens and the destruction of houses. In today’s world, forensic detail is far too often overlooked.
The second half of the book focuses on Fallujah. Unable to enter the city because of the military cordon, Jamail interviews refugees from the shattered city. The hellish nightmare for the thousands of residents who remained was made worse by the Iraqi Red Crescent convoys being unable to enter the city, despite an appeal to the UN.
Dahr Jamail is very critical of the United Nations, describing them as “prov[ing] its impotence in all matters”. I would disagree with him here, although there is plenty of evidence that the UN is becoming corrupted, given the revelations about UN aid workers in Liberia donating food in exchange for sexual favours.
As Jamail reminds us at the end of his introduction, each of the 27 million or so people in Iraq has their own story. Although no book could hope to document all of them, Beyond The Green Zone goes some way to explaining how it feels to be occupied by the gung-ho US military after years of Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime.
Richard Brennan
