FOR PATHETIC LIBERAL, Gandalf Grey ==> The news from Iraq via the Washington Post: Rubbish
Liberals Are Losers
http://snipurl.com/7fam See also http://snipurl.com/7fay
_____________________
Eric M. Johnson, a writer in Washington D.C., participated in Operation
Iraqi Freedom as a Marine Corps reservist.
Iraq veterans often say they are confused by American news coverage,
because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists
report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in
almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don¡¦t get much
notice ¡V or in many cases, any notice at all.
Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau
chief for the Washington Post. He spent most of his career on the metro
and technology beats, and has only four years of foreign reporting, two
of which are in Iraq. The 31-year-old now runs a news operation that
can literally change the world, heading a bureau that is the source for
much of the news out of Iraq.
Very few newspapers have full-time international reporters at all these
days, relying on stringers of varying quality, as well as wire services
such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse, also of varying quality. The
Post's reporting is delivered intravenously into the bloodstream of
Official Washington, and thus a front-page article out of Iraq can have
major repercussions in policy-making.
This effect is magnified because of the Post's influence on what other
news organizations report. While its national clout lags behind the New
York Times, many reporters look to the Post for cues on how to approach
a story. The Post interprets events, and the herd of independent minds
bleat their approval and start tapping on their keyboards with their
hooves.
Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of
articles from Iraq ¡V and if there are no events to report, they
resort to man-on-the-street interviews and cobble together a story from
that. Last
week, there was a front-page, above-the-fold article about Iraqis
jeering U.S. troops, which amounted to a pastiche of quotations from
hostile Iraqis. It was hardly unique. Given the expense of maintaining
an Iraq
bureau with a dozen staffers, they have to write something to justify
themselves, even if the product is shoddy.
This week, Chandrasekaran has a Pulitzer-bait series called "Promises
Unkept: The U.S. Occupation of Iraq." The grizzled foreign-desk veteran
-- who until 2000 was covering dot-com companies -- now sits in
judgment over a world-shaking issue, in a court whose rulings echo
throughout the media landscape. He finds the Bush Administration
guilty. Such a surprise.
Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already
quoting Iraqis proclaiming the American operation a failure. Reading
his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative
take shape: basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don¡¦t
know what they¡¦re doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative
informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises,
who rotate in and out of Iraq.
How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with
our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Al Kut last
April, talked to a few of our officers, and toured the city for a few
hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to
Baghdad to write about the local unrest.
"The Untouchable 'Mayor' of Kut," his article's headline blared the
next day. It described a local, Iranian-backed troublemaker named Abbas
Fadhil, who was squatting in the provincial government headquarters. He
had gathered a mob of people with nothing better to do, told them to
camp out in the headquarters compound, and there they sat, defying the
Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
Chandrasekaran was very impressed with the little usurper: "'We thank
the Americans for getting rid of Saddam's regime, but now Iraq must be
run by Iraqis,' Fadhil thundered during a meeting today with his
supporters in the building's spacious conference room. 'We cannot allow
the Americans to rule us from this office'....Fadhil has set up shop in
an official building and appears to have rallied support across this
city of 300,000 people.
"The refusal of Marine commanders to recognize Fadhil's new title has
fueled particularly intense anti-American sentiments here,"
Chandrasekeran continued. "In scenes not seen in other Iraqi cities,
U.S. convoys have been loudly jeered. Waving Marines have been greeted
with angry glares and thumbs-down signs."
Readers must have concluded that Kut was on the verge of exploding. The
entire city was ready to throw out the despised American infidel
invaders and install their new "mayor" as their beloved leader.
What utter rubbish. In our headquarters, we had a small red splotch on
a large map of Kut, representing the neighborhood that supported Abbas
Fadhil. When asked about him, most citizens of Kut rolled their eyes.
His followers were mainly poor, semi-literate, and not particularly
well-liked. They were marginal in every sense of the word, and they
mattered very little in the day-to-day life of a city that was
struggling to get back on its feet.
We knew the local sentiment intimately, because as civil affairs
Marines, our job was to help restore the province's water, electricity,
medical care, and other essentials of life. Our detachment had teams
constantly
coming and going throughout the city, and Chandrasekeran could have
easily accompanied at least one of them.
Since he didn't, he couldn¡¦t see how the Iraqis outside of the red
splotch reacted to us. People of every age waved and smiled as we
rumbled past (except male youths, who, like their American
counterparts, were too cool for that kind of thing.) Our major security
problem was keeping friendly crowds of people away from us so we could
spot bad guys.
None of those encouraging things made it into the article. Nor did
anything about how we had been helping to fix the city¡¦s problems as
soon as we arrived. Just a quick-and-dirty sensationalistic piece about
a local
Islamist thug bravely going toe-to-toe with the legendary United States
Marines. The general reaction to Chandrasekeran¡¦s article was either
laughter or dumb bewilderment.
Soon afterwards, a Marine commander met privately with Fadhil and told
him he would be forcefully removed if he did not leave the government
building. Fadhil, chastened, asked if he could slither into exile
without the appearance of coercion, so he could save face. The
commander agreed. Suddenly faced with a real confrontation, the "mayor"
had backed down, and he left without any riots or bloodshed. The
Americans took over the office that Fadhil said we should never occupy.
The Post didn't cover any of that,
either.
Don't take my word for it that the Post¡¦s reporting is substandard
and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post's assistant
managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6
piece, he admits that "the threat of violence has distanced us from
Iraqis." Further, "we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by
telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the
military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their
reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation." Translation: we
are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location
dozens of miles away from the fighting.
Bennett flatly concedes that they have a ¡§dim picture¡¨ of what is
happening in Iraq, (not that you would know it from the actual news
articles he approves for publication.) "The people of Iraq...are
leading their country, and ours, down an uncertain path. This is a
story waiting to be told."
Waiting to be told? They have four or five full-time reporters there at
any given time. What are they doing, if they're not telling the story
of Iraq's new birth?
Bennett might have added that not only are the reporters "distanced"
from Iraqis, they're distanced from Iraq itself. Covering it from
Baghdad is like covering California from a secure bunker in
south-central Los Angeles. Sure, a lot happens in L.A., but you're
going to miss important things if you don't go to San Diego or San
Francisco, or even Bakersfield once in a while.
Chandrasekeran¡¦s meta-narrative admits of no ambiguity. For him and
his reporters, they report in straightforward, declarative sentences,
with none of the caveats that Bennett mentions. The Americans are still
bumbling, the Iraqis continue to seethe. So it shall be in the
Washington Post, until Iraq succeeds and they can no longer deny it,
just like journalists were forced to admit reality at the end of the
Cold War. Or else their words will have their effect, and Western
journalists have to flee the country as it disintegrates.
Since I saw Rajiv Chandrasekaran's integrity up close, I haven't
believed a word he writes, or any story coming out of the bureau he
runs. You shouldn't, either.
gar...@ix.netcom.com
a fight, hoping to find an excuse to wage war. Evidence supporting that
view has emerged in the form of a memo released on May 1, 2005 in the
London Sunday Times disclosing that, after a visit with Bush, England's
equivalent of the head of the CIA, MI-6's Dearlove reported to Tony
Blair that the decision to attack had been made, intelligence was being
"fixed" to support the war decision and that little or no planning had
gone into what was to be done in the aftermath of the war.
The record reflects that Dearlove's assessment was uncannily accurate
on all counts and yet that's not the end of the revelations.
Another story has come from the Times of London that is as important as
the "smoking gun" memo.
Apparently, the USA and the UK were doing what rogue nations bent on
war often do: trying to provoke a war with a country that posed no
threat.
The story follows and can be read in the original on line as indicated
below.
Gary
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html
May 29, 2005
RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war
Michael Smith
THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping
bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into
giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.
The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United
Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the
attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By
the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.
The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key
meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how
to make "regime change" in Iraq legal.
Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that "the US had
already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the
regime".
The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the
allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002
as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their
attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.
During 2000, RAF aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq
dropped 20.5 tons of bombs from a total of 155 tons dropped by the
coalition, a mere 13%. During 2001 that figure rose slightly to 25 tons
out of 107, or 23%.
However, between May 2002 and the second week in November, when the UN
Security Council passed resolution 1441, which Goldsmith said made the
war legal, British aircraft dropped 46 tons of bombs a month out of a
total of 126.1 tons, or 36%.
By October, with the UN vote still two weeks away, RAF aircraft were
dropping 64% of bombs falling on the southern no-fly zone.
Tommy Franks, the allied commander, has since admitted this operation
was designed to "degrade" Iraqi air defences in the same way as the
air attacks that began the 1991 Gulf war.
It was not until November 8 that the UN security council passed
resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with "serious consequences"
for failing to co-operate with the weapons inspectors.
The briefing paper prepared for the July meeting - the same document
that revealed the prime minister's agreement during a summit with
President George W Bush in April 2002 to back military action to bring
about regime change - laid out the American war plans.
They opted on August 5 for a "hybrid plan" in which a continuous
air offensive and special forces operations would begin while the main
ground force built up in Kuwait ready for a full-scale invasion.
The Ministry of Defence figures, provided in response to a question
from Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs
spokesman, show that despite the lack of an Iraqi reaction, the air war
began anyway in September with a 100-plane raid.
The systematic targeting of Iraqi air defences appears to contradict
Foreign Office legal guidance appended to the leaked briefing paper
which said that the allied aircraft were only "entitled to use force
in self-defence where such a use of force is a necessary and
proportionate response to actual or imminent attack from Iraqi ground
systems".
Click here to read the Iraq memo
spar...@my-deja.com
> The news from Iraq via the Washington Post: Rubbish
>
> http://snipurl.com/7fam See also http://snipurl.com/7fay
>
> Eric M. Johnson, a writer in Washington D.C., participated in
> Operation Iraqi Freedom as a Marine Corps reservist.
>
> Iraq veterans often say they are confused by American news coverage,
> because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists
> report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in
> almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don't get much
> notice, or in many cases, any notice at all.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8101422/site/newsweek/
"Living and working in Iraq, it's hard not to succumb
to despair. At last count America has pumped at least
$7 billion into reconstruction projects, with little
to show for it but the hostility of ordinary Iraqis,
who still have an 18 percent unemployment rate. Most
of the cash goes to U.S. contractors who spend much
of it on personal security. Basic services like
electricity, water and sewers still aren't up to
prewar levels. Electricity is especially vital in
a country where summer temperatures commonly reach
125 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet only 15 percent of Iraqis
have reliable electrical service. In the capital,
where it counts most, it's only 4 percent."
The Tinkerbell gambit ("clap LOUDER") doesn't seem to be working, Loser.