It's worse than you think.
Last night I went to see independent journalist Dahr Jamail speak and read from his book: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.
From the excerpts he read, I felt that what most distinguishes Darh Jamail's reporting from mainstream news coverage of Iraq - besides the fact that he looks beyond U.S. military press releases - is the way he humanizes the Iraqi people. He didn't even have to read about the horrors civilians suffer in undirected attacks, although he did. He could achieve this perspective in his listeners simply by stating a man was a doctor, describing where he lived, saying his name.
We are trained, in this country, to see Iraqis as statistics. When we look closer I think even their names are used to distance them from us - they're so foreign, so ominous, so Muslim. Jamail overcomes this by treating their experiences, their testimonies, their lives, as worthy of attention.
It wasn't easy to hear, because this war is a horror on every level; it's too often deliberately horrific on our part, with policy-makers acting with malice and in bad faith; it's ongoing; and it's ours. But at the same time, there were some spots of hope. He told us that there is refusal going on within the U.S. military now, and has been since 2003, in the form of "search and avoid" missions. Soldiers, realizing that their rolling patrols simply get them shot at and blown up without accomplishing anything, drive to the middle of a field somewhere, sit there and drink soda, and radio in every hour saying everything's fine.
You don't hear about that on CNN.
You can read a Democracy Now interview with Jamail, find more on the book and where he'll be speakng at BeyondTheGreenZone.org, or read his ongoing blogging and reportage Dahr.org.
Not by Jamail, but on the topic of the violence and U.S. troop withdrawal... one analysis by bloggers says that, contrary to the "whack-a-mole" analogy, violence drops when U.S. troops leave.
From the excerpts he read, I felt that what most distinguishes Darh Jamail's reporting from mainstream news coverage of Iraq - besides the fact that he looks beyond U.S. military press releases - is the way he humanizes the Iraqi people. He didn't even have to read about the horrors civilians suffer in undirected attacks, although he did. He could achieve this perspective in his listeners simply by stating a man was a doctor, describing where he lived, saying his name.
We are trained, in this country, to see Iraqis as statistics. When we look closer I think even their names are used to distance them from us - they're so foreign, so ominous, so Muslim. Jamail overcomes this by treating their experiences, their testimonies, their lives, as worthy of attention.
It wasn't easy to hear, because this war is a horror on every level; it's too often deliberately horrific on our part, with policy-makers acting with malice and in bad faith; it's ongoing; and it's ours. But at the same time, there were some spots of hope. He told us that there is refusal going on within the U.S. military now, and has been since 2003, in the form of "search and avoid" missions. Soldiers, realizing that their rolling patrols simply get them shot at and blown up without accomplishing anything, drive to the middle of a field somewhere, sit there and drink soda, and radio in every hour saying everything's fine.
You don't hear about that on CNN.
You can read a Democracy Now interview with Jamail, find more on the book and where he'll be speakng at BeyondTheGreenZone.org, or read his ongoing blogging and reportage Dahr.org.
Not by Jamail, but on the topic of the violence and U.S. troop withdrawal... one analysis by bloggers says that, contrary to the "whack-a-mole" analogy, violence drops when U.S. troops leave.