[antimedia] antimedia: Wouldn't it be nice if reporters....

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Posted by antimedia:
Wouldn't it be nice if reporters....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1176142248.shtml


   ....would [1]tell the truth like this more often? Tish Durkin is
   anti-war -- she says so herself -- yet she admits to some astounding
   things about Iraq that have never been reported by the media.

     Whatever you think of the rest of this post, please do not write in
     to impress upon me the horrors that have descended upon innocent
     Iraqis since the American-led invasion. I really feel that I know.
     I know other things too, though. Maybe it's just the contrarian in
     me, but it is these other things that I feel the need to stress,
     especially to those who are now reveling in their rightness about
     the war. Those who opposed the war seem to feel that they are the
     perfect opposite of those who sold the war - and of course, in the
     important sense of the invade-or-not-to-invade question, they are.
     But in their collective allergy to any fact that may complicate
     their position; their proud blindness to the color gray, and their
     fervent faith in their own infallibility, the two sides have always
     struck me as very much the same.
     Don't get me wrong. If I felt that this post were going to be read
     by a bunch of war apologists, I would take them angrily to task for
     the manifest, manifold failures in Iraq, and the criminally
     self-indulgent fictions on which those failures were based. But
     since this post is presumably being read mostly by war critics, I
     will devote it to challenging anti-war activists on their apparent
     belief that everything they say about Iraq is, always has been, and
     ever shall be true.
     It is not, for instance, true that it was the American-led invasion
     that opened season on the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians.
     Whatever else the Bush administration made up about Iraq, the rank
     murderousness of Saddam Hussein was not one of them. Amid the
     gunfire and giddiness of Baghdad right after its fall in April
     2003, it was common to find people converging onto bits of
     infrastructure, manically fueled by the rumor mill: someone had
     said that there was a torture chamber underneath this stretch of
     highway; a secret prison built into this wall. People had no time
     to be interviewed; if they talked at all, they'd keep going as they
     panted: "My husband/brother/son disappeared twenty odd years ago;
     he could still be alive; I have to get him out." I remember going
     to a mass grave; a "minor" one, not far from Hilla. People were
     digging there, too: for bones, which were piled everywhere, a
     sickening canine bonanza. Close by there still lived a man who had
     seen what had happened there in the days after the war with Kuwait,
     but kept his mouth shut for years: busloads of innocent Shi'ites,
     screaming 'God is Great' at the top of their lungs, had been
     unloaded, rung around pre-dug graves, and shot.

   Read the rest. It's filled with truth, so much truth that the
   commenters got quite riled up at Tish for speaking the truth -- for
   simply relating what she had personally experienced in Iraq.
   For example.

     I remember that in May - after about thirty days without a shower -
     I went to a beauty salon that had just re-opened. This was in
     Aadamiyah, which is quite a Sunn'i district. Out of gratitude for
     the invasion, the owner would not let me pay.
     In the late spring of 2003, like hundreds of reporters, I joined
     the multitudes flocking to Karbala for ashura, the Shi'ite
     pilgrimage which had been forbidden under Saddam. Concerns about
     violence were high, but unfounded: As it turned out, in every
     possible sense, it was the brightest possible day. Flags were
     flying. Great ropey lines of men were stepping rhythmically and
     ritually beating their bare backs. Granted, the whole scene could
     have been a coming attraction for theocracy, but for the moment, it
     looked and felt like an entire country's drawing of a deep breath
     after years of suffocation. Like every woman there, I was swathed
     in black from head to toe. Throughout the day, I could feel myself
     being sized up by people, and this, I'll admit, made me a little
     nervous. No need: when they were sure of the foreignness of my
     face, people did not insult or attack me. They smiled and said:
     "Thank you Bush, thank you Blair."
     None of this was really surprising. In the months prior to the war,
     I had spent almost all my time in neighboring, not-so-democratic
     countries. Among average people, the biggest sentiment expressed
     about the ever-more-likely prospect of American action in Iraq
     wasn't "how dare you come to our region and topple a sovereign
     government!" It was, "jeez - why don't you come here too?" Once in
     Iraq, when I would get e-mails from concerned friends and family as
     to whether people hated me because I was an American, I'd laugh. It
     wasn't the idea of Americans being disliked that cracked me up; it
     was the idea of Americans being alone on the list, or even in the
     top ten. Let's see: Iraqis hated the French and the Russians for
     doing so much business with Saddam. They hated other Arab
     governments for leaving them to be brutalized by him. They hated
     the Palestinians for having sided with Saddam in the war of '91,
     and they hated the Syrians for sending in - or at least allowing
     the sending-in of --- jihadists to make trouble now. As for
     anti-American sentiment, that which was most commonly expressed was
     not against George W. Bush for having taken Saddam out. It was that
     expressed against George H.W. Bush for not having done so when, as
     they viewed it, he had had the chance.

   The commenters jumped all over Tish. They don't want to hear the
   truth. They hate Bush. They hate Cheney. They hate everything
   conservative. No facts that are counter to their beliefs, even if
   presented by one of their own, are allowed. It would be comical were
   it not so sad.
   One is left to wonder, however, why we never heard these stories told
   by the media. Why we are told, even today, that it was a lie that we
   would be greeted as liberators when, in fact, as Tish reveals, we
   were.
   One wonders what might be different, even today, had the media told
   the truth. (Hat tip to [2]Mickey Kaus.)

References

   1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tish-durkin/iraq-a-place-of-ambivale_b_45145.html
   2. http://www.slate.com/id/2163575/