If you pass this convoy you will be killed...

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2004/December/opinion_December44.xml§ion=opinion&col=

Facts about Iraq you wouldn’t know from Western media

BY PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY (ONE MAN’S VIEW)

25 December 2004

THIS has been a bad year for war correspondents. The war in Iraq is, of course, not over and yet we know less about it than ever before. Even events such as the major assault on Fallujah seem to have moved to the back pages of the Western media. As one British columnist put it before the assault began, “We won’t hear the screams of the civilians”.

One major reason for this is that the assault has been reported by correspondents “embedded’ with American military units”. So we have seen lots of TV footage of American marines running through the streets of Fallujah firing apparently indiscriminately. Only occasionally have we seen the results of this firing — including a group of Iraqis shouting defiantly ‘Allahu Akbar’ as an American mortar shell collapsed a ceiling over their heads. One might think that from the Western point of view the war against insurgents has been going well. That is certainly the view propagated in Washington and London. The truth is that it has been going very badly but is now so dangerous for independent Western war correspondents and even representatives of the Arab media to move freely around Iraq, that no one really knows what is happening.

Under the regime of the interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Iraqi exiles report that the multinational forces ‘remain immune from legal address and are only rarely held accountable for crimes against Iraqis. And while cabinet ministers and the US and UK embassies huddle inside a fortified green zone, Iraqis are denied the basic right of walking safely in their own streets. US tanks rumble by with signs saying “If you pass this convoy you will be killed.” snip

Iraqi women had schools for girls as early as 1899 and by 1933 Unicef was reporting that rarely had women in the Arab world enjoyed as much power as they did in Iraq. By the early 90’s, Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world and had more professional women in positions of power than in other Middle Eastern nations. These are just a few of the aspects of life in Iraq. How many more are we not being told about?

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[leftchick]

1. and rummy says the librul media is not reporting the good stuff...

here is some good stuff rummy...

<snip>
Where in the Western media have you read that under Western occupation acute malnutrition has doubled amongst children, prostitution, back street abortion and honour killing have grown? Where have you read about the napalm, cluster bombing and phosphorous bombing by US planes? The death toll is now more than 100,000 — half of them women and children.

The US is committing war crimes in Iraq! :(

[opihimoimoi]

2. If Foolish Leaders Can Fool the Followers, they can RULE

To Fool is to Rule.

[pretzel4gore]

3. cambodia, lebanon and maybe chile too

the pattern dfor the west has been that countries in 3rd world that do achieve a level of development w/out prostituting themselves are invariably destroyed somehow....cambodia under prince sihanouk somehow avoided the nastyness around it, and bacame 'the switzerland of the east' (until the US secretly bombed cambodia, when it knew it was being driven out of vietnam etc, saying cambodia was a refuge for the viet cong, thus triggering overthrow of sihanouk by commie crazies and blah blah blah)....lebanon up until the 'civil war' in the early 70's was called the 'paris' of the middle east, a gorgeous city crawling with secret agents (kim philby lived there for awhile in 40's 50's) and the place everyone put the money for safekeeping....chile, of course, was the one working democracy in latin america until the '73 coup. i recall reading an article about literacy back in the 70's; only two 3rd world countries had achieved 90 plus percent literacy in total population: Cuba and IRAQ!
ours is a perverted and nasty society