Dahr Jamail's Insurgent Mix Tape

Let me preface this by saying that Dahr Jamail, a journalist who writes for IPS, has actually been to Iraq and has done lots of unembedded work - this naturally makes him better qualified to speak on matters of how the Iraqis feel about things than I am. I'm not impugning his character for who he talks to or what he sees.

That said, I am taking serious issue with his total lack of neutrality. I don't expect pro-American sentiment and I don't actually want any pro-American sentiment in a piece of what is supposed to be objective journalism. If a piece is objective, then there ought not be any sentiment in it at all, which is what I would prefer. Michael Totten can manage that. Dahr Jamail has abandoned the idea altogether in favor of posting rants from his own email inbox. From his article in the Asia Times:

"Of late, I have been asking Iraqis I know by email what they make of the American version (or versions) of the unseemly reality that is their country, that they live and suffer with. What does it mean to become a 'secondary issue' for your occupier? "

He's naturally talking about election politics in the US, and doing a pretty serious butcher job on it as well. While for a candidate, Iraq may not be the most pressing issue by election time, what political analysts interested in the election are saying and what the majority of voters think are very much different things.

As to why Iraq may be taking a back seat, it's really very simple. We can read the emails from the angry Iraqis that he knows, and try to extrapolate from those anecdotal rants, or we can look at the objective data that we've been seeing coming out of Iraq. One of these things is useful and has predictive and instructive power; the other is a waste of our time.

"Tahir, on the other hand, has a warning: 'It seems that all US politicians and the majority of Americans think the way McCain does. But they should not think Iraq is Japan or South Korea.'"

The content of the statement itself is hamhanded, ignorant, and totally worthless. There's nobody in the US who thinks that the Americans have completely aligned themselves with McCain or his rhetoric about the duration of the war. To even suggest it is to deny the existence of the slew of Democratic presidential candidates, who all happen to disagree with McCain. But I don't need to tell you that, because you're not an idiot.

Put more diplomatically, you're in touch with American politics, and Tahir, whoever he is, has no idea what the American political atmosphere is like.

All that aside, the fact that Dahr Jamail didn't think the statement was worthless is indicative of a few other things, first of which is that quality information about American politics is severely lacking in whatever region Tahir is from. When people say that the US is losing the information war, this kind of thing is exactly why they say it. Tahir should not be able to say something so ludicrous without being laughed at, and Jamail should not be able to include it in a serious news article without being scoffed off the face of the earth.

We're still not winning the information war; there are clearly too many Iraqis we aren't getting through to. We can make what excuses we like for this clear lack of footing in the info war, but there it is - it still needs lots of work.

The second thing it can tell us is that one of the reasons we're not winning the information war is because of people like Dahr Jamail, who perpetuate and legitimize the insurgent narrative. If that seems unfair, let me corroborate it:

"Abu Taiseer, another resident of Baquba, summed up Iraqi bitterness this way:

At the very beginning of the occupation, the people of Iraq did not realize the US strategy in the area. Their strategy is based on destruction and massacres. They do anything to have their agenda fulfilled. Now, Iraqis know that behind the US smile is hatred and violence. They call others violent and terrorists while what they are doing in Iraq and in other countries is the origin and essence of terror."

Alright, I suppose that's nothing that the American left hasn't also claimed, no matter how preposterous it is - if it's not totally clear at this point that massacres and destruction do not move a counterinsurgency forward, there's no hope trying to convince them. But still, nothing a hardcore leftist wouldn't say. Maybe saying that Jamail is advancing the insurgent narrative is overstepping a bit. Then I would offer this:

"Abu Tariq, a merchant from Baquba, believes the US military intentionally destroyed Iraq's infrastructure. He told Ali,

The Americans destroyed the electricity, water-pumping stations, factories, bridges, highways, hospitals, schools, burnt the buildings, and opened the borders for the strangers and terrorists to get easily into the country. The one who does all these things is void of humanity. I hate America and Americans."

Short of publishing a myopic email that calls for outright violence, I'm not sure Jamail can do anything more to push insurgent propaganda. I'm not saying that the people who wrote to him are insurgents. I'm saying that they're parroting the insurgent narrative, wherein the US is responsible for quite literally every last one of the ills in their society. They're doing it because that's what they're told. They're told that because the US isn't doing a better job of telling them otherwise.

That needs to change. Iraq isn't out of the woods yet, and until we can win over insurgent propaganda, we still stand to lose what we've done so far.