My latest New Matilda column is about the Iraq war and the mainstream media’s inability to report perspectives other than those uttered by the US military: Mainstream media coverage remains tied to reporting ”˜progress’ from the mouths of American reporters and American officials, most of whom remain journalistically and morally embedded. One Iraqi reporter recently…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
The price of “freedom”
The New York Times page one story today is about Baghdad’s improved security. The facts seem to speak for themselves. And yet: The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets…
The legacy awaits
Craig Unger, author of The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future, Harpers, November 19: Already, the Iraq War has cost nearly 4,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, hundreds of…
The future is bleak
Leading investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: Barack Obama represents the only hope for the US in the Muslim world. We’re facing two or three decades of problems in the Mideast, with 1.2 billion Muslims. They say the surge [ in Iraq] has worked. But do you think someday we will get an oil deal in Iraq?…
Analysis of a blind man
Rupert Murdoch says he “knows a bit about” Iraq and Afghanistan, thinks Australian troops should remain in Iraq and believes that Western victories in the ravaged countries are at hand. Would that prediction be accurate as his belief in 2003 that one of the benefits of the Iraq war would be US$20 barrels of oil?…
What we aren’t hearing about Iraq
Dahr Jamail, author of the stunning book Beyond the Green Zone, takes questions from firedoglake blog readers in the US. Despite the mainstream media recently reporting that Fallujah was on the way to recovery, a reality check from Jamail: Fallujah today remains largely destroyed. I have an Iraqi colleague who I continue to do stories…
Getting to the heart of the matter
The Columbia Journalism Review recently hosted an important event about the role of journalists in Iraq and their ability to report the truth: Four of the journalists featured in Reporting Iraq—Deborah Amos (NPR), Anne Barnard (New York Times/Boston Globe), Ali Fadhil (translator turned documentary producer), and Elizabeth Palmer (CBS News)—joined us for a roundtable discussion…
News bytes
– Former UN chief Boutros Boutros Ghali blames Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East. – Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill challenges the US Congress to get serious about military contractors in war zones. – The latest on impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney. – While Israel remains a nuclear power, they aren’t too…
Tasting failure
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon, November 8: Every aspect of Bush’s foreign policy has now collapsed. Every dream of neoconservatism has become a nightmare. Every doctrine has turned to dust. The influence of the United States has reached a nadir, its lowest point since before World War II, when the country was encased in isolationism.
Invisible horrors
Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, November 5: Government ministers now talk of Iraq as a tragedy, as if it was a natural disaster and they had no hand in its making. There’s a public revulsion at the violent sectarian struggles best summed up as “a plague on all their houses”, as even the horror gives way…