War Journalist on Iraq

[bloodyminded]

A fascinating interview with journalist Nir Rosen by Glenn Greenwald. Rosen has just released a book called Aftermath, and he discusses the problems of journalism in Iraq, as well as the dire situation in the country.

He says that one of the problems with war journalism is that journalists, understandably but uselessly avoid the difficult and inconvenient circumstances required to get an objective accounting. So instead, they'll either keep to an embedded process, or they'll spend time with the pro-Western (and often out-of-touch) Iraqi elites. It's much easier.

Rosen's account truly smears the picture painted by those who still think the war a good idea, and those who, while they might have opposed it, are desperate to "look on the bright side."

A couple of excerpts from the interview:

I guess one thing we miss is just the deep humiliation and disruption that results from a foreign occupation. Now, most American soldiers are familiar with the movie Red Dawn, so sometimes I try to use that as a way to get them to understand the other side, although I guess they're these days probably too young to remember that movie. But even if the American soldiers aren't necessarily killing innocent people or torturing them, it's the mere presence, it's so brutally disruptive, the checkpoints, the strangers going into your house, constantly having foreigners with guns pointed at you wherever you go, people telling you what to do who don't speak your language. If they arrest one of the men in your house, you don't know who to appeal to.

If you're lost and scared, there are huge guys with helmets and vests and weapons who are shouting at you. And even if they were girl scouts, they have these immense vehicles and they go on the roads and are breaking irrigation pipes and accidentally running over your car or damaging it. It's a constant disruption and humiliation and fear which I don't think Americans have been able to appreciate. To us to perceive the American military is acting somewhat like cops on the beat or boy scouts whereas for locals it much a more painful and humiliating and scary experience.

That left hundreds of thousands of people whose men and sons and husbands and fathers disappeared. Kids watching their fathers being taken away, the kids are screaming, daddy, daddy, and father's desperate and he's bleeding and being beaten and dragged away. So that's hundreds of thousands of families horribly brutalized and traumatized and children who were urinating on themselves at night because they're so scared, the Americans are coming and take them away too. And the women are left with nobody who can care for them and feed them, families devastated. Millions of refugees created. They are displaced either internally or abroad, living in poverty. People who may have been wealthy or middle class even.

Secular Iraqis, liberal Iraqis, educated Iraqis, now reduced to prostitution, having their kids sell cigarettes on the street, lives totally ruined when you're 50 years old, you cannot begin again, especially in a country like Syria or Jordan where there's already a poor economic environment and you don't have access to any kind of employment. And their kids can't go to school, so you now have a generation of children who haven't gone to school for about the last five years.

Every family that I've met in Iraq, or Iraqi refugees as well, has been touched by kidnapping and murder and rape and displacements. You have half a million Iraqis today living inside Iraq who are homeless, squatting in illegal settlements, living in shacks made out of tin cans and cardboardI saw a house made out of used air conditioners piled up on top of each otherliving in massive pits of sewage, stinking of shit, flies all over the place. And, of course, let's not forget you had hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, murdered, disappeared, tortured to death with power drills, with beheadings, their bodies found weeks later in garbage dumps. Hundreds and hundreds of villages in Iraq totally destroy in a civil war, like in Rwanda or Bosnia. Every house blown up. All that's left is a pile of rubble and women's shoes.

It's a totally destroyed society, and militias may not have a real hold today the way they did in the past, but torture is routine and systematic now. If you get arrested, you get tortured. Corruption is rampant; it's one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Services are terrible, almost no electricity, dirty water, terrible malnutrition, kids not going to school. It's just a destroyed, brutalized and beaten place where the worst kind of people have taken over. There's no space for womencertainly it was better to be a woman under Saddam. Honor killings have increased. It's just a real betrayal of the hopes that Iraqis had with the removal of Saddam.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html

Edited December 17, 2010 by bloodyminded

[bud]

A fascinating interview with journalist Nir Rosen by Glenn Greenwald. Rosen has just released a book called Aftermath, and he discusses the problems of journalism in Iraq, as well as the dire situation in the country.

He says that one of the problems with war journalism is that journalists, understandably but uselessly avoid the difficult and inconvenient circumstances required to get an objective accounting. So instead, they'll either keep to an embedded process, or they'll spend time with the pro-Western (and often out-of-touch) Iraqi elites. It's much easier.

Rosen's account truly smears the picture painted by those who still think the war a good idea, and those who, while they might have opposed it, are desperate to "look on the bright side."

A couple of excerpts from the interview:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html

an interesting article. thanks for sharing.

salon.com continues to impress me with the quality of their work.