IRAQ 2


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	IRAQ 2 . . . In regard to Mr. McGurn's June 7 [2004] commentary in The Fifth Column: We are told by the French and others that no analogy should be made between World War II and Iraq. Possibly so. But in one area, the general disposition of European states toward the conflict, there is an eerie similarity to 1940-44. It might help to look at where those states actually stood when the outcome of World War II was in doubt: France: The legitimate government (Vichy) was in effective alliance with Nazi Germany following its peace treaty with Hitler on June 17, 1940. Gen. Charles de Gaulle and the Free French represented only a splinter of recognizable French opinion until victory was assured. Spain: Barely restrained from joining the Axis powers by U.S. bribes of food aid and by general exhaustion from its civil war, but it did contribute a division to fight against Russia. Ireland: Interpreted its neutrality in a manner that was seriously harmful to Britain and her allies throughout the war. Sweden and Switzerland: Neutral, but grew rich supplying raw material and products such as iron ore and instrumentation, essential to the German war effort. Russia: Officially allied with Germany, supplying propaganda and vital war material, including oil and grain, until invaded by Hitler on June 22, 1941. M. Donald Coleman Mamaroneck, N.Y. Letter to the _Wall Street Journal_ [June 2004] - Some who stayed wished they hadn't. They told of savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade - all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam's praises. Saddam's henchmen took the videos as newsreels to document their deeds in honor of their leader. But these awful images didn't show up on American TV news. In fact, just four or five reporters showed up for the screening at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which says it got the video via the Pentagon. Fewer wrote about it. No surprise, since no newscast would air the videos of Nick Berg and Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl getting decapitated, or of U.S. contractors in Fallujah getting torn limb from limb by al Qaeda operatives. But every TV network has endlessly shown photos of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib. Why? [...] Media analysts like Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler admit it sounds "sanctimonious" to justify publishing prison abuse photos - but not al Qaeda beheading videos - in the name of showing "the reality of war." But that is just what he did. AEI spokeswoman Veronique Rodman, puzzled by the minimal interest in the Saddam torture video, is sure that if it was a video of equally horrific torture committed by U.S. troops, the press would find ways to show or report it. Reporters have to face up to the fact that right now, if we highlight the wrongs that Americans commit but not - out of squeamishness - the far worse horrors committed by others, we become propaganda tools for the other side. This isn't to argue in any way against reporting the Abu Ghraib scandal. But reporters have to face up to the problems - and find ways to achieve a more balanced account. Saddam's torture videos may be too awful to show, but it's hard to explain the low media interest in the story of seven Iraqi men who had their right hands chopped off by Saddam's thugs - and then got new prosthetic arms and new hope in America. They're eloquent, they're available, they're grateful for the U.S. liberation of Iraq. No one can better talk about Saddam's tortures - and no one is more eager to do so. Yet, as of yesterday, the New York Times had written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib - with over 40 on the front page. The self-proclaimed "paper of record" hadn't written a single story about those seven Iraqi men. --Deborah Orin "Reporting For The Enemy" [Spring 2004] - BAGHDAD - For many Iraqi children, a car bombing or mortar strike isn't a tragedy. It's the biggest excitement of the week. They are drawn by billowing smoke, police sirens and the certainty that journalists will soon arrive to interview witnesses. The children flood to the scene, pick through debris, wave to television cameras and interact with the U.S. troops who show up to clear the wreckage. So it was Thursday when scores of children rushed to the site of a suicide car bombing in the working-class Amal district of Baghdad. They marveled at the crater left by the bomb, practiced their English on troops and rode bicycles around the American tanks. They accepted candy from a soldier. Then a second suicide bomber barreled down the street toward the U.S. and Iraqi forces - and the children who surrounded them. And then a third. The children were no longer observers of the attack, but its victims. "I saw dead bodies scattered like sheep," said Rashid Salih, 67, describing the scene where his grandson was killed. [...] Iraqi health officials said 35 of the 42 fatalities from Thursday's blasts were children. "What really hurt me was that most of the killed or injured people were children," said Moyad Ismail, 25, who saw the U.S. soldier handing out candy minutes before the second explosion. "The children were making a ring around the soldiers." [...] A man whose nephew was killed by shrapnel sat slumped on the curb, his head in his hands, weeping uncontrollably. "They are killing scores of innocent Iraqis in order to kill one or two Americans. What sort of jihad is this?" asked Salih, the 67-year-old grandfather. "What sort of religion allows such bad people to commit such hideous, horrible crimes?" --Edmund Sanders and Raheem Salman "Children's Curiosity Proved All Too Deadly This Time" _Los Angeles Times_ [October 1, 2004] - German pundits and critics of the Bush administration may scream and shout as they might about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: But had the world continued on the course set out by them, Saddam Hussein's regime of mass murder would still be in power and democracy would still be but a distant dream to many in the Middle East for whom freedom is now a tangible goal. Certainly, the abuses at Abu Ghraib represent a moral setback for the United States. Some critics of the Iraq war have even called Abu Ghraib a moral "catastrophe." What these very critics fail to see is that their own decades-long indifference to the plight of the oppressed peoples of the Middle East, borne of a convenient mix of knee-jerk pacifism and deep-seated economic interests, represents a true moral catastrophe. European foreign ministers and leaders comfortably sipping tea and brokering multi- billion dollar business deals with dictators in expensive palaces and then criticizing the US for its dealings in the Middle East is hypocrisy of the highest degree. Above all, European indifference and inaction in the face of mass murder and genocide represent the greatest "moral catastrophe" of recent times in the democratic West. Nothing, not historic pacifism nor economic interests can justify the collective inaction on the part of Europe's elites when confronted with mass graves and genocide in Iraq, Rwanda, the Balkans or Sudan. Until Europeans come to terms with the very real consequences of their own stifling indifference and inaction, it will be difficult for Americans to take seriously the endless litany of protest, derision and criticism echoing from across the Atlantic. --Claus Christian Malzahn "Terminator? Demokrator!", _Der Spiegel_ - Dearest ---- I'm writing this for one reason only. On April 13th 2004, I thought I was going to die. My only regret is that I hadn't spent enough time with you. That I hadn't told you everything I wanted to. Being in Iraq for a 3rd time, I don't want to feel that way again because it was the worst feeling ever. So this letter is in case I won't ever get the chance to tell you. Obviously, if you're reading this, then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark. Well I can't type forever, I know you want to read more but I thought simple and to the point would be easier. I love you with all my heart. Goodbye my Love... --Marine Cpl. Jeff Starr, KIA in Iraq, letter to his girl friend found on his computer after it was shipped home to Seattle, quoted at Blackfive blog - When it comes to tyranny, we believe we can offer some personal experience. [...] During the decades of dictatorship, our peoples' attempts to restore freedom and democracy were crushed. Who would have thought in 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, or in 1980 in Poland, that we could get rid of the dictatorial regimes in our lifetimes and shape our own future? The memories of tyranny are still alive in the minds of many Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks. We also remember the challenges we faced early in our democratic transition. [...] We could not have made it alone. We needed the perseverance and support of Western democracies for freedom to finally arrive. [...] We feel that as free and democratic nations we have a duty to help others achieve the security and prosperity that we now enjoy. That is why we have been a part of the coalition to help democracy emerge in Iraq. [...] The good news is that we are not alone; it's a truly international partnership, based on a U.N. mandate. More than 30 nations are on the ground with the coalition and NATO, and more than 80 have signed up for the "new international partnership" with Iraq. [...] Democratic transition is a long, painful process. It requires sacrifice. But, more than anything, it requires belief that democratic values will prevail and people will have a better life as a result. [...] Maybe it takes countries with vivid recollections of tyranny to serve as the institutional memory of a larger community of democracies. If so, we are ready to fulfill that role." By Rastislav Kacer, Petr Kolar, Janusz Reiter and Andras Simonyi - Respectively the Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian ambassadors to the U.S. _Wall Street Journal_ [16 December 2005] - From: Mayor of Tall ‘Afar, Ninewa, Iraq In the Name of God the Compassionate and Merciful To the Courageous Men and Women of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who have changed the city of Tall’ Afar from a ghost town, in which terrorists spread death and destruction, to a secure city flourishing with life. To the lion-hearts who liberated our city from the grasp of terrorists who were beheading men, women and children in the streets for many months. To those who spread smiles on the faces of our children, and gave us restored hope, through their personal sacrifice and brave fighting, and gave new life to the city after hopelessness darkened our days, and stole our confidence in our ability to reestablish our city. Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young. This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi’s followers after harsh fighting, killing many terrorists, and forcing the remaining butchers to flee the city like rats to the surrounding areas, where the bravery of other 3d ACR soldiers in Sinjar, Rabiah, Zuma and Avgani finally destroyed them. I have met many soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment; they are not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism. The leaders of this Regiment; COL McMaster, COL Armstrong, LTC Hickey, LTC Gibson, and LTC Reilly embody courage, strength, vision and wisdom. Officers and soldiers alike bristle with the confidence and character of knights in a bygone era. The mission they have accomplished, by means of a unique military operation, stands among the finest military feats to date in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and truly deserves to be studied in military science. This military operation was clean, with little collateral damage, despite the ferocity of the enemy. With the skill and precision of surgeons they dealt with the terrorist cancers in the city without causing unnecessary damage. God bless this brave Regiment; God bless the families who dedicated these brave men and women. From the bottom of our hearts we thank the families. They have given us something we will never forget. To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be forgotten for giving their precious lives. They have sacrificed that which is most valuable. We see them in the smile of every child, and inevery flower growing in this land. Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life. Finally, no matter how much I write or speak about this brave Regiment, I haven’t the words to describe the courage of its officers and soldiers. I pray to God to grant happiness and health to these legendary heroes and their brave families. NAJIM ABDULLAH ABID AL-JIBOURI Mayor of Tall ‘Afar, Ninewa, Iraq --Iraqi mayor thanks American troops [February 2006] - Saddam's Lidice [8 March 2006] _Wall Street Journal_ How mighty a state is Germany -- That can drag from his bed unawake, unaware, Unarmed, a man, to be murdered where His wife and child must watch and see; Then carted them off in truck and cart Into Germany. ... --From "The Murder of Lidice," by Edna St. Vincent Millay In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood. On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany. Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice." Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly: That night, security forces arrested 350 villagers, including 15-year-old Ahmad Hassan Mohammad. "They blindfolded me," Mr. Mohammad recalled while testifying during Saddam's trial in Baghdad last December. "But I was so young, it [the blindfold] kept falling." He described seeing "a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair [on it and] I saw bodies of people from Dujail." Of Mr. Mohammad's 10 brothers, seven were murdered by Saddam's henchmen, along with 141 others from Dujail. As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers. "You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you," Mr. Mohammad recalled one of the torturers saying. Now come to the present. Last week, Saddam acknowledged in court that he had ordered the summary trial that led to the execution of the villagers and the destruction of their farmland. "Where is the crime?" he asked, claiming that as president of Iraq all his actions were lawful. Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trial famously adopted a similar defense. Saddam and his seven co-defendants have also been doing their utmost to turn the trial into farce, heckling the judges and calling on Iraqis watching on TV to rise up against Coalition forces. Saddam has also protested the indignity of having to ride a service elevator and use a toilet exposed to public view. "Is this humanitarian?" he griped in court. While there is much to regret in the way this trial has been conducted -- Saddam and his co-defendants should have been placed, Adolf Eichmann-like, in a glass box, to be seen but not heard -- there is also much to admire. For Iraqis, it has been a short course in what democratic justice is all about, with its procedures, its standards of evidence, and its respect for the rights of the defendant, and how all that differs from the arbitrary "justice" to which they were too long accustomed. For much of the wider Arab public, the trial has also exposed the criminality of a once widely admired man. But there's a broader lesson here. We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis, even when it came to a comparatively small massacre such as the one in Dujail. That's something in which Americans can take justifiable pride, as much as the World War II generation did in defeating the Nazis. And it's something to which critics of the war, at least those who profess sincere concern with human rights, ought to give some thought. As Millay wrote: Ask yourself, ask yourself: What have we done? Who, after all, are we? That we should sit at ease in the sun, The only country, the only one, Unmolested and free? Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait! Or will you wait, and share the fate Of the village of Lidice? - "Cooking the books on Iraqi deaths" Las Vegas Review-Journal [14 January 2008] _Study that influenced election now largely discredited_ Three weeks before the 2006 midterm elections gave Democrats control of Congress, "A shocking study reported on the number of Iraqis who had died in the ongoing war," the National Review notes in its Jan. 4 cover story. Published by The Lancet, a venerable British medical journal, that study estimated the number of "excess" Iraqi deaths after the 2003 U.S. invasion at 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs or U.S. airstrikes. The stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths that had been estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group. Those predisposed to oppose U.S. policy in Iraq seized on the numbers and trumpeted them giddily. CBS News called the report a "new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq." CNN said, "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times generated large stories that gave the study results credence. Democrats who had opposed Mr. Bush's Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., issued a statement saying that the "new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war. ... We must not stay on the same failed course any longer." Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles and broadcasts, helped cement Americans' increasingly negative perceptions of the war. "For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment" in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby in a CNN interview. But it now turns out the report was financed by wealthy leftists including George Soros, and that its authors (Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts) are anti-war activists who requested their studies be published shortly before the U.S. elections -- which the editor of The Lancet agreed to do "with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data," Neil Munro and Carl Cannon report in the National Review. Furthermore, after an exhaustive investigation, Messrs. Munro and Cannon conclude the studies' authors may have performed their field research "improperly -- or not at all." The 2006 study relies on a system of multiplication, in which each death supposedly recorded by the survey teams in the small number of "sampled" neighborhoods is multiplied by the number 2,000 to reach an estimate for the number of deaths nationwide. A car bomb attack in Sadr City that killed at least 60 people appears to have been counted by the researchers, even though it happened a day after the survey was supposed to end, critics say. Multiply that one incident by 2,000, and it adds 12,000 statistical "car bomb deaths" nationwide -- as though car bombs are as frequent and as deadly in rural areas as they are in heavily contested Baghdad (and as though internecine car bombings are the same thing as innocent civilians strafed and killed by chortling monsters in U.S. uniforms.) Both the 2006 and a prior 2004 Lancet study of Iraqi war deaths by the same authors rely entirely on data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role, the National Review reports. Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Until last fall, Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite religious leader whose Mahdi Army militia crippled Sunni insurgent groups in Baghdad during 2006, controlled the health ministry, which employed some of Lafta's researchers. "The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data," says David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. In plain English, the Lancet study on civilian deaths was absurd -- making up fairy tale graveyards containing hundreds of thousands of bodies that no one can locate -- and when asked to see their data, the authors have responded either by making stuff up, or claiming, "The dog ate my homework." Yes, wars cause unintended "collateral" death and destruction among civilian populations. But the fantastic and fanciful Lancet numbers were promoted without skepticism by branches of the news media that welcomed them precisely because they told a story those media wanted to tell. A story designed to hurt an administration they despised, promoted despite the fact it also strengthened our enemies, and may have contributed to the loss of U.S. lives. Political opinions were formed based on those credulous reports. A little, "Whoops, have we got egg on our face" at this late date, is hardly sufficient to right that wrong. - end page \| ABORTION - ARABS \| ANTI-AMERICANISM \| ANTI-SEMITISM \| BALI - BUSH \| CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) \| ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS \| GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO \| GUN CONTROL & GUNS \| HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS \| HURRICANE KATRINA \| IRAN \| IRAQ 1 \| IRAQ 2 \| ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE \| LEFTISTS \| MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS \| MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES \| NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT \| RADICAL THOUGHT \| RAP MUSIC \| STEM CELL RESEARCH \| TERRORISM 1 \| TERRORISM 2 \| TERRORISM 3 \| TERRORISM 4 \| TERRORISM (PREVENTING) \| UNITED NATIONS \| \| Return Home \| The Credits \| The Cast \| Act 1 \| Act 2 \| Act 3 \| The End \| The Reviews \| Photos \|