NEW YORK, April 7, 2004 -- It's the oldest story in the world: what goes up, comes down. All the bluster, PR, "positive" press, bullying, distortion, deception, and military tough-guyism cannot keep a flawed policy afloat. The invasion of Iraq, sold as the "liberation of the Iraqi people," was always a movie with a bad script, flawed characters, and no third act.
Despite all the Bremer ballast served up about how only a handful of Saddam-worshipping, al-Sadr-loving, Al-Qaeda-following fanatics stand in the way of a US-imposed democratic paradise, the reality on the ground suggests otherwise. A Sunni-Shia opposition movement is emerging, and gathering steam.
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Colonel Gardiner is not optimistic about the odds for coalition forces to cope with this new style of combat:
"We have to keep in mind that the military and political leadership in the United States have been terrible at assessing the situation in Iraq, going back to when the plan for the invasion was put together. I've not heard any good assessment of what's going on now."
If the reporting on the US military campaign is fundamentally flawed, its meaning is often obscured, wrote Robert Fisk of The Independent in London:
"The grim truth, however, is that the occupying powers are now facing insurrection of various strengths in almost every big city in Iraq. Yet they are still not confronting that truth," writes Fisk.
For the past nine nights, Fisk reports, the main US base close to Baghdad airport -- and the area around the terminals -- has come under mortar fire. "But the occupying powers have kept this secret."
They would prefer to tell us that the US occupation is working, that democracy is right around the corner.
Dahr Jamail, who writes for the website Electronic Iraq, blames US media coverage for reinforcing a government propaganda view that distorts what is going on. "[T]here is a horrendous disparity between what is really occurring on the ground and what the Western corporate media chooses to report," he wrote last week.
» Misreporting the Uprising in Iraq: How Media Misses the Story
Excerpt made on Monday April 12, 2004 at 01:10 AMI think 1st Lt. Mark V. Shaney USMC said it best when he said:
"Responsible journalism should include responsibility for one's actions in publishing a news story in such a way that puts many other people in harm's way; has a direct result of publication of a particular story might have on other people.
"We are a people that cherish the democratic system of government and therefore hold the will of the enemy is trying very hard to portray our efforts over here, you can refute them by knowing that we are failing, even if we are making the whole world safer. "
Raymond Onnard
And as always: "Quidquid excusatio prandium pro!
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