November 2004

Iraq is always bad news - according to the media. A lightning quick war; few civilian deaths; the destruction of a fascist regime supporting terror [see the 9-11 commission report for Iraq-Al Qaeda links – there are 4 pages listed of connections]; and the beginning of democracy in a bad neighborhood are ignored. For the first time in 5000 years the Iraqi’s will be in charge of their own affairs. Within a few years the country will be stabilized and well on the way to joining the comity of nations. I fail to see why Liberals think that Iraq after 50 years of fascist repression, must be rebuild over the weekend.

The media was wrong about;
-The war’s duration
-Number of predicted civilian dead
-Turkey invading northern Iraq
-Iran invading eastern Iraq
-A pan-Middle East civil war erupting
-The ‘Arab street’ rising in protest and demanding a Pan Arab crusade in Iraq
-The price of oil [after all according the media, the US only wants cheap oil]

Can you imagine CNN, the BBC, ABC, CBS and the CBC covering D-Day, June 6 1944 ? The headlines would be: 'Disaster', 'Not enough progress', 'Bad Planning', 'Eisenhower a fool', ‘Churchill incompetent’ and so on. There would be cameras showing tearful mothers in their kitchens crying over their lost sons as they broadcast the body bag count and announce that we need to pull out from Normandy and that the Boche are too tough and after all Hitler and his Nazi’s love their children too. Appeasement concepts would be broadcasted day and night in the Liberal media. Armchair critics on CNN would state emphatically that the entire operation was ill-timed, ill-planned and that the Allied intelligence had failed. After all the Brits and Americans were certain Hitler had WMD and mustard gas. Why then was he not using it ?

I am awaiting for the NY Times to scream ‘Time for the US to pull out of New York City - 1000 now dead this year from homicides'. Or the Toronto Star to moan and ask; '150 dead in Toronto in disastrous campaign of murder, is it time to pull out ??' Or maybe the LA Times to intone; 'UNO says that 900 homocide deaths in LA unsustainable and that the US must pull out.' The Moscow Times could always lament; ‘22.000 people die in Russia from car accidents each year – time to pull out ??’ More people die on North American city streets or in Russian Lada’s in a year than will die in Iraq in the same period.

Europe and Canada with their closed political systems, legal trained elite, and state socialist broadcasting are endemically and patently anti-American. The unfortunate aspect is that 80 % of news coverage on the major US outlets is also rather anti-American and pro-internationalism. The MRC [www.mrc.com] has many reports on this - on every topic from Iraq to Kyoto. 80 % or more of the time the reports will favor the internationalist position. Iraq has been a case in point. I don’t remember the media reporting on Hussein’s mass graves or the 250.000 Iraqi’s he murdered with such intensity as they recount and expand upon each GI body bag. Nor is there any coverage on the 90 % of Iraq that is safe and slowly rebuilding.

Reconstituting a country that did sponsor terror, threaten oil supplies, lost a '91 war and then ignored the cease fire agreement, repudiated UNO resolutions, attacked its neighbors, vituperated daily about an Arab jihad against Israel, and had all sorts of strange ideas about WMD production and usage is a benefit for the world community. I can't understand the media who maintain that the old fascist regime, and the Oil for Food scam was better. The UN, France, Germany, Russia, China, Hussein and various terrorists groups did very well during the 1990s Oil for Food scam – about $50 billion is the estimated total of history’s largest fraud though it could well wind up being quite a bit higher. Meanwhile 250.000 Iraqi’s were liquidated while the UN and its allies lined their pockets. Yet the media ignores this immorality and corruption and focuses and indeed delights in reporting car bombings and firefights while informing the public that Iraq is a mess. It has little to say about the 90 % of Iraq that is peaceful, rebuilding and experiencing some form of normalcy from markets to health care provisioning.

Iraq is not a quagmire. It has nothing in common with Vietnam. The only sensible parallel one can inference between Iraq and Vietnam is the media obsession to ensure that the US loses the war, by losing domestic support. However, I think a great number of US citizens are now wise to the media bias and are tuning it out. Let’s hope so. The worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam would be a US withdrawal from Iraq before the job is finished. We saw what happened when the US left Vietnam. An entire region went up in flames, with Communists murdering millions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Only now is this region beginning to heal itself. The Iraqi people deserve better. The war on terror demands better. The media should lay off.