???A journalist who has gained fame for his raw reporting about the current situation in Iraq painted a bleak picture Tuesday night of the war-ravaged country in the Student Union Theater.
???Dahr Jamail, an American journalist who has won numerous awards including the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism, spent eight months in Iraq interviewing civilians.
???"The current situation on the ground is devastating," Jamail said. "Forty-five percent of Iraqis have no clean water, and unemployment ranges throughout the country from 25 percent to 75 percent."
???Jamail stated that the three major hospitals in Baghdad are constantly full and the morgue refrigerators are overflowing with bodies that are stacked on top of one another.
???He explained that Baghdad was once a metropolitan city with a European feel. Since the American invasion in 2003, the city has been transformed into a city of ghettoes, with sections blocked off from one another based on religious affiliation and people fleeing their homes, never to return.
???"Before the war, Baghdad was 65 percent Shiite, 30 percent Sunni and most recently, numbers have climbed to 70 percent Shiite," Jamail said. "One in four people who live in Baghdad have been displaced and one in six have been displaced nation-wide, many of whom refuse to return."
???According to Jamail, 1.2 million people have fled Iraq and 1.3 million have been killed.
???Jamail also spoke about how U.S. policies and actions in Iraq have contributed to the decay.
???The reporter showed what he believed to be malicious policies by quoting a U.S. document outlining a national security strategy plan to increase American military forces to "dissuade any and all who seek to rival America's military might" and establish bases "far-reaching from Europe to the Middle East to Asia."
???He pointed out that the invasion was a bipartisan war, built upon a relationship with Iraq that was decades old, and not just a George W. Bush, Republican-led war. ???According to Jamail, the CIA arranged a bloodless coup in 1968 to install Saddam Hussein as a leader in Iraq, an action that the U.S. came to regret.
???He also drew a connection to U.S. actions in El Salvador during the 1980s when President Reagan's ambassadors and military advisers, Col. James Steel and John Edgar Ponti, organized death squads in the country.
???"These same men from El Salvador, John Edgar Ponti and Col. James Steele, both were in Iraq," Jamail said. "[They] were put in place to run death squads again."
???According to Jamail, they began to target the leaders of the insurgency in Iraq, outsourcing the kills to Kurdish and Sunni militias. He citied a slip-up by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, referring to the "Salvadorian option" as a new tactic to be used in Iraq.
???Jamail also criticized President-elect Barack Obama, who has promised a withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and the redeployment in Afghanistan.
???"With the staff and advisers he's been surrounding himself with, nothing at all will change," Jamail said. "Recent reports from his camp would have as many as 60,000 troops stationed in Iraq by the end of his first term. Nothing I have seen suggests change."
???According to Jamail, one of the most central problems in Iraq is the apparent lack of a conscience displayed by corporations in Iraq, citing Halliburton as a prime example.
???"As the CEO of Halliburton, [Vice President Dick] Cheney was looting the Pentagon of $9 million dollars for a study contracted by KBR to find out if privatization of the logistical side of the armed forces would be better run by an outside company," Jamail said. "The Department of Defense approved this by rewarding KBR the first log cap contract. A log cap contract basically states the more a company spends in a warzone, the more they stand to profit."
???Although Jamail drew a dreary image of Iraq, he was optimistic in the ability to turn this around. He stated that he hopes that students get up and act to help the country.
???"I often think when I am 80 years old and kids ask me about 2008, I can say I cared about something important and I did something," Jamail said.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
