What I heard about Iraq in 2005

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

by Eliot Weinberger

December 30, 2005
London Review of Books

In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.

<snip>

I heard that Iraq was now ranked with Haiti and Senegal as one of the poorest nations on earth. I heard the United Nations Human Rights Commission report that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled since the war began. I heard that only 5 per cent of the money Congress had allocated for reconstruction had actually been spent. I heard that in Fallujah people were living in tents pitched on the ruins of their houses.

I heard that this year’s budget included $105 billion for the War on Terror, which would bring the total to $300 billion. I heard that Halliburton was estimating that its bill for providing services to US troops in Iraq would exceed $10 billion. I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000.

<snip>

I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: ‘The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.’

*

I heard that the Lincoln Group, a public relations firm in Washington, had received $100 million from the Pentagon to promote the war. As well as bribing Iraqi journalists, often with monthly stipends, the Lincoln Group was writing its own articles and paying Iraqi newspapers to publish them. I heard that the articles, intending to have local appeal, had titles such as ‘The Sands Are Blowing toward a Democratic Iraq’ or ‘Iraqi Forces Capture al-Qaida Fighters Crawling like Dogs’. I heard a Pentagon spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, say: ‘We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction.’ I heard him quote the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: ‘Remember, half the battle is the battlefield of the media.’ I heard that the average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, had gone from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WEI20051230&articleId=1676

There was a documentary on LinkTV where a camera crew got to go into the Memorial it's a very wide spiraling case that goes downward from ground level. On the walls are the names of those who died in the war. It had been turned into a parking garage and the troops put up parking signs and slogans on top of the names of the dead Iraqis. Maybe they had no idea what it was before they took it over but with things like this happening no one should wonder why Iraqis want us out.

. . "Masters of War" as a twenty-two year-old . . .

The relevance of the song, and his insight into the minds of these bloodthirsty, moneygrubbing dickheads, I still find astounding.

These accounts of what the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys are still wreaking upon the downtrodden and helpless, along with their ancient, irreplaceable cultures . . .

Absolutely chilling.

"And I hope that you die,
And your death it comes soon,
I'll follow your casket
In the pale afternoon . . ." -B. Dylan

:cry:

is "Oh the liberal media is not telling the whole story". "Oh we're doing such good things over there and you don't hear it". Now I find only a fraction of the bad stuff is getting reported. Informed public indeed.