Robert Parry: Big Media Hectors Obama on 'Surge'

[babylonsister]

Big Media Hectors Obama on 'Surge'
Barack Obama | Iraq | Media | War
by Robert Parry | July 29, 2008



For six years, with few exceptions, the Washington press corps has been cheerleading for the Iraq War – and the pattern is continuing in Campaign 2008 with the endless demands that Barack Obama apologize for not supporting the troop “surge.”

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw became the latest Big Media star to hector Obama about his opposition to George W. Bush’s troop “surge,” which the U.S. press corps and Republican John McCain credit with reducing violence in Iraq.

Obama’s efforts to point to other factors that predated the “surge” – such as the Anbar Awakening (the Sunni tribal rejection of al-Qaeda extremists) and cease-fires ordered by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr – fall on deaf ears.

Even further out of the U.S. news media’s frame are uglier realities that Obama doesn’t mention:

--Brutal ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.

--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also have “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.

--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years now, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.

--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

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