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An Iraq correspondent in two
worlds
By Dahr Jamail
Note
Dahr Jamail, an
independent reporter from Alaska, covered the
occupation of Iraq for much of 2004 and the
beginning of 2005, before returning to the United
States early this year. As a "unilateral", he was
a distinctly atypical figure in Baghdad. Unlike
other members of the media, he lacked the guards,
vehicles, elaborate home base, tech support,
fixers and all the other appurtenances of an
American journalist. Unlike most American
reporters, however, Jamail (gambling his life)
refused to let himself be trapped in his hotel,
and so his reporting was of the (rare)
outside-the-Green-Zone variety. Like many war
veterans - military or journalistic - Jamail found
the experience of coming home unsettling. He
recently returned to the Middle East and, as he
was departing, wrote the following.
It
isn't an accident that, after 11 weeks, only as
I'm leaving again, do I find myself able to write
about what it was like to come home - back to the
United States - after my latest several-month
stint in Iraq. Only now, with the US growing ever
smaller in my rearview mirror, with the strange
distance that closeness to Iraq brings, do I find
the needed space in which the words begin to flow.
For these last three months, I've been
bound up inside, living two lives - my body
walking the streets of my home country; my heart
and mind so often still wandering war-ravaged
Iraq.
Even now, on a train from
Philadelphia to New York on my way to catch a
plane overseas, my urge is to call Iraq; to call,
to be exact, my interpreter and friend, Abu Talat
in Baghdad. The papers this morning reported at
least four car bombs detonating in the capital;
so, to say I was concerned for him would be
something of an understatement.
The
connection wasn't perfect. But when he heard my
voice, still so far away, he shouted with his
usual mirth, "How are you my friend?" I might as
well be in another universe - the faultless
irreconcilability of my world and his; everything,
in fact, tied into this phone call, this
friendship, our backgrounds ... across these
thousands of miles.
I breathe deeply
before saying a bit too softly, "I just wanted to
know that you're all right, habibi." The direct
translation for "habibi" in Arabic is "my dear".
It is used among close friends to express
affection and deep trust.
It's no fun
having a beloved friend in a war zone. I'm all too
aware now of what it must be like for loved ones
and family members to have those close to them far
away and in constant danger - it's no way to live.
Having spent so many months in Iraq myself, I
finally have a taste of what my own loved ones
have been living with.
While bloody Iraq
stories are just part of the news salad here for
most Americans - along with living and dead popes,
Michael Jackson, missing wives-to-be, and the
various doings of our president, George W Bush - I
remained glued to the horrifying tales streaming
out of Baghdad and environs. I sent e-mails to Abu
Talat and other friends constantly to check on
their safety in that chaotic, dangerous land I'd
stopped being any part of.
Trying to live
life here with some of my heart and most of my
mind in Iraq, which is endlessly in flames, has
felt distinctly schizophrenic. It's often seemed
as if I were looking at my country through the
wrong end of a telescope, even as I walked down
the streets of its well-functioning cities, padded
through a coffee shop where everyone was laughing,
relaxed, or calmly computing away, or sat for
hours in a room that possessed that miracle of all
miracles - uninterrupted electricity.
I
ask Abu Talat if the most recent car bombs were
close to his home. "There have been 10 car bombs
in Baghdad today, habibi, at least 30 people
killed with over 70 wounded. Iraqis are suffering
so much nowadays. It's becoming unbearable, even
for those of us who have known so much suffering
for so long."
This time I find, to my
amazement, that I'm wiping back the tears and
forcing back the crazy desire I've been unable to
dodge all these months to return to Baghdad. Right
now. This second. That old pull to plunge back
into the fire, despite the obvious risk. To be
with my close friend, in solidarity, in a place
that, absurdly enough, seems more real to me now
that this one somehow doesn't. To be there on the
front lines of empire, able to see, without
blinking, without all the trimmings, the true face
my country shows the world.
"Please stay
safe habibi, and I will see you soon," I tell him
as my train approaches New York where I am to
catch my flight.
"Insh'Allah - God willing
- I will stay safe and will see you soon, habibi.
Insh'Allah," he replies. Then he quickly tells me
there's gunfire nearby. He has to go. I wait for
him to hang up first. It's a kind of ritual. Only
then do I push the button on my phone, set it
down, and leave Iraq once again for this country
of mine where I've never quite landed.
Just beyond the train window, trees and
houses race past as we speed along. I watch the
peaceful American countryside zip by, knowing Abu
Talat, having just dropped his wife and children
off at her father's for safety, is trying to make
his way home through streets filled with fighting
and criminal gangs, the constant threat of more
car bombs in the night, and a military cordon
around his neighborhood. He is concerned that his
home will be looted if he isn't there and feels
it's worth the risk to return to his neighborhood
to guard his belongings, even though the area has
been sealed off by American soldiers.
I'll
check in with him again later ... obsessively ...
to see if he's in one piece at the other end of
the invisible phone line that still seems to
connect us, along with all my other friends there.
Of course, it's just a regular day for him in
Baghdad, and another irregular, out-of-body
experience back here, where, with every
long-distance chat, the duality in me seems to
grow more extreme.
Questions of
identity
Coming home from the war in Iraq,
I find another kind of duality. It seems to me
that the war I've left is going on at home on many
fronts - and yet most people seem almost
blissfully unaware of it.
I was in Juneau,
Alaska, when the Senate voted to take another step
toward opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(ANWR) for drilling. So another, allied kind of
war continues on the beautiful, precious land of
my home state. I wonder how many of the proponents
of drilling are aware that the oil drawn from ANWR
won't even be used domestically, but will be sold
to Japan. I wonder how many Americans, whatever
their positions, know this.
For 10 weeks now
I've traveled along each coast giving Iraq war
presentations, most of the time to large crowds
hungry for information. It's been heartening to
see so many people so concerned, as well as angry,
about what's being done in their name - and with
their tax money.
Upon returning from a
presentation in Vancouver, Canada, I wait for a US
border agent to scan my passport. I watch him
languidly flicking through my many pages of
Jordanian/Iraqi/ Lebanese/Egyptian visas, staring
at the Arabic script and stamps.
"What were
you doing in the Middle East," he asks. I feel a
little spurt of anger and glance up at the signs
all across the border station informing non-US
citizens that they will have their photos taken
upon entry and then their index fingers placed on
a scanner - solely for our safety and security, of
course. I have that natural human urge to tell him
it's none of his damned business where I've been;
after all, the United States is, at least in
theory, a free country. Instead, of course, I
simply say, "I'm a journalist."
He looks
at me, hands me my passport, and I come home yet
again. As for the anger, it quickly dissipates.
Such a small moment amid so many larger
catastrophes. Besides, he's just doing his job.
Not too long after, I get an e-mail from a
friend in Baghdad who's just spoken with a friend
of his, a teacher in Fallujah. She crossed another
kind of "border" there, also guarded by Americans
- a border around her own city. She had to undergo
a retinal scan mandated by the Americans and had
all 10 fingers printed in order to obtain the
necessary identification badge that,
unfortunately, she then lost while shopping in a
Baghdad market. When she tried to return to
Fallujah without it, Iraqi National Guard soldiers
wouldn't let her back in.
"She told them
she'd lost her ID in Baghdad at the market, that
she wants to go home, that they have to let her
in, but they refused," my friend wrote. "A
neighbor of hers inside Fallujah was there and
told them she was his neighbor, but they refused.
She called her husband with her neighbors' mobile
and he came to the checkpoint with her papers,
showing that she is his wife and he lives in
Fallujah but they still refused to let her in."
She was crying, my colleague said, as she
related her woes to him. She had lost nine
relatives during the American assault on the city
in November 2004. Then he wrote: "I want you to
tell your friends and your audience about this.
Please ask them what would happen if they were
prevented from getting inside their city although
the people inside knew they were a teacher who had
to get to their school?"
My friend also
wanted me to ask what Americans would do if our
country were invaded and the only ID that was
worth anything was that given by the invading
forces - even though you had several of your
regular forms of identification with you?
Being a raving lunatic and other
confusions of war
Of course, most
Americans back in this strange land know nothing
about such doings in Iraq, thanks to the ongoing
efforts of the Bush administration and its
faithful loudspeaker, the corporate media, which
has done such a fantastic job of whitewashing the
degrading situation in Iraq: Fallujah begins to
resemble a concentration camp; the death toll of
innocent Iraqis continues to escalate; the Iraqi
resistance and foreign terrorist groups are now
focusing heavily on the new Iraqi government and
the new Iraqi security forces; the American troops
continue their aggressive operations - and all
that comes through here in this still
peaceful-seeming land are flickering images of
car-bomb carnage.
In 1968, in the
Vietnamese village of My Lai, American troops
massacred more than 400 innocent civilians, by far
the majority of whom were women, children and the
elderly. In Fallujah during the November siege of
the city, according to Iraqi medical personnel,
well over 1,000 innocent civilians (the majority
of whom were women, children and the elderly) were
slaughtered. More than 1,000 innocent civilians,
people who, under the Geneva Conventions, an
occupying power is required by law to protect,
died in what was essentially a Vietnam-style
"free-fire zone".
In "Conditions of
Atrocity" written for the Nation magazine, Robert
Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and well-known expert on
humans in extreme moments, cited both My Lai and
the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib as examples of what
he called "atrocity-producing situations ... so
structured, psychologically and militarily, that
ordinary people, men or women no better or worse
than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities. In
Vietnam that structure included 'free-fire zones'
(areas in which soldiers were encouraged to fire
at virtually anyone); 'body counts' (with a
breakdown in the distinction between combatants
and civilians, and competition among commanders
for the best statistics); and the emotional state
of US soldiers as they struggled with angry grief
over buddies killed by invisible adversaries and
with a desperate need to identify some 'enemy'."
Sound familiar?
"This kind of
atrocity-producing situation," Lifton added,
"…surely occurs in some degree in all wars,
including World War II, our last 'good war'. But a
counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting,
especially when driven by profound ideological
distortions, is particularly prone to sustained
atrocity - all the more so when it becomes an
occupation."
As my thoughts are being
calmed by the blur of trees and houses out the
train window, I'm suddenly brought back with a
jolt - as has happened over and over in these few
weeks - to Iraq-in-America. Another passenger
seats himself next to me, reads the paper, and
then turns - I suppose simply because I'm there -
and asks, "Did you see Bush's press conference
yesterday?"
I tell him I hadn't.
"This damned guy! When are people going to
wake up to his bullshit?"
I assure him I
have no idea - and that's true. I've been
wondering just the same thing ever since I came
home. But he doesn't need much from me. As if he'd
been reading my mind, he quickly lets loose with
this: "I'm a Vietnam vet. My son just got back
from Iraq. He was in Fallujah in November. It's
all bad, man. My son, he's like me, he won't talk
to many people about what happened over there ...
but he told me."
He looks me in the eye
intently and then points to the side of his head -
that familiar kid's gesture for insanity - and
continues, "Now my son has problems upstairs. He
told me they don't have a plan, they don't have a
solution, they're just trying to contain things
over there."
He rattles on, angrily, and I
nod while I glance out the window from time to
time, letting his information settle in on top of
what Abu Talat has just told me. I finally
indicate to him that I understand, because I'm a
journalist who has spent a fair amount of time in
Iraq recently.
But he's not in need of
encouragement. "Bush is a draft dodger and a
deserter," he continues. "He and all his cronies
are thieves and should be in jail! If I keep
talking about this I'm going to lose it. Have a
good trip."
He gets up and walks away. I
take a deep breath. This isn't the first time I've
had folks unload on me about Iraq. I guess it's in
the air. I've had similar encounters with Iraq
veterans from both our Gulf wars while traveling,
as well as with civilians. Every encounter - the
ones where no one mentions Iraq as well as the
ones where it comes up - has its bruising aspects.
I've had to go back to some of my family members
and make amends for an outburst just after I
returned. Feeling the desperation of the situation
there and overwhelmed by the urge to bring Iraq
home to people who truly have no idea what's
happening tends to put one in an awkward situation
where it's not too hard to come off as a raving
lunatic.
Is there anyone in the world…?
At least in these weeks, I've begun to
understand what war veterans who have seen the
bodies - as I have - get to deal with on returning
home. Now that I've had a little time to get my
head on straight, to process some of the
atrocities I saw, and to take a little breath, I
find myself, against my better judgment and
everything I swore I wouldn't do, heading back to
the Middle East; back to chronicle more of what's
happening there. I keep wondering how long it can
go on; how long so many people in my home country
will continue to ignore it, to be complicit,
whether they know it or not, in our brutal
occupation - so long after it was proven beyond a
shadow of a shadow of a doubt that this war was
illegal and based on nothing but lies. I can't
help wondering as well how long they will be
complicit as their tax dollars continue to be
spent on a war machine that is eating their
children and loved ones, along with innocent
Iraqis; complicit as social programs and benefits,
civil rights and liberties are stripped from them
- a little more with each passing day.
Even a debate among anti-war groups about
whether the United States should withdraw
immediately or propose a phased withdrawal on a
timetable was capable of sending me off the rails.
All I could think was: silly debate. As though
either view of how "we" should proceed mattered,
as though their opinions carried the slightest
weight with the no-timetable Bush administration.
I kept wondering why the streets here
weren't filled with people every single day ...
A couple of days ago, I forwarded an
e-mail to Abu Talat that had been sent to me by a
man who attended one of my presentations. He had
thanked me for telling and showing him the truth
... the photos, the footage, the stories of Iraqis
and of US soldiers. He had written asking me to
tell my Iraqi friends how horrified he was by what
our country was doing in Iraq, that he was doing
whatever he could to stop the occupation.
Abu Talat wrote back to him directly - the
longest e-mail I'd ever seen him send - and
forwarded a copy to me. Here's what he said in his
eloquent, though hardly perfect English:
Thank you Americans (those who
believe that American troops are destroying
Iraq). Those who believe that facts cannot be
hidden with chicken mesh. Who believe they have
no right to put ideas in the minds of people of
a civilized country, a country in which
civilization began before the United States
existed. Those people who know that democracy is
not given, it is obtained. Who know that Iraqis
are people who have to live just like any
nation. Who believe that we are no different in
the ability of our minds because God made us all
so you cannot force us to have the ideas of
others unless we accept it after we are fully
contented. Those people of the world who raise
their voices against colonialism, control,
force, the invading of other countries… I thank
them, I encourage them, and I ask God to save
them.
Other people of the world who are
not on these ethics, who don't implement those
ideas, I call them to look around themselves, to
awaken themselves, to put themselves in our
position. To face what we face, to remember that
they don't accept in any way to be insulted, nor
to be threatened or killed like what is
happening in my country by the invaders. I ask
God to spare any difficulty from their country
rather than being invaded.
…Is there
anyone in the world who can accept to be killed?
Or detained for no reason? Is there any of you
who can accept to be put in the situation we are
facing, to see their houses crashed or
demolished, ended, to see your people treated
with no respect, to have guns aimed at them
wherever they go, to live without electricity
when you used to have it, to see roads closed…
whether they will live until tomorrow under a
normal life, these are, my friends, just a few
things to be told.
So please tell your
friends and people to raise their voices to pull
the troops out from invaded Iraq. Seeking that
God helps Iraqis to bare the situation done by
the troops of the invaders. From the
window of my plane, I watch the lights of New York
fade - and the internal duality quickly begins to
fade with the glowing lights of the colossal city.
Somewhat to my surprise, it encourages me to know
I'm now moving ever closer to the place where so
much of my heart turns out still to be. Unsure
whether or not I'll actually go into Iraq, at
least I will be nearer to it, and to Abu Talat and
my other friends who live the brutality of life
there every day. At least I'm on my way back to a
place where I feel I can do something, even if
sometimes that only means providing moral support
for habibis. At least I'm on my way back to a
place where few can help but be aware of what is
truly happening. At least I'm on my way, ever
closer to occupied, inflamed Iraq.
Dahr Jamail is an independent
journalist from Alaska who has spent eight months
reporting inside occupied Iraq.
(Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail )
(Published with permission of TomDisptach.com) |
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