From Amcostarica.com :
Residents of Iraq did not ask to be sacrificed.
It is the beginning of the fourth year that the United States will be fighting its war in Iraq, and the news is full of pros and cons concerning whether the war is going well or not. There continues to be controversy over being there in the first place. And the polls are showing a steady reduction in the number of Americans who think it is worth it.
President Bush is going public frequently to defend and define his position and rebuild support for the war. And the administration as well as others are putting some blame on the media for the dwindling support because, it is claimed, the media show only the bad news, the violence and destruction, and are not reporting the good things that are happening there.
Once in a while someone will point out that since news was invented it is the bad news that is going to get the headlines. Put another way, if in one week, two bombs exploded in New York City and six people were killed in Washington by a suicide bomber, no one would expect the media to headline their stories with the news that rebuilding in New Orleans was going well.
Of course, when there is a lull in the violence and killing, there is room for good news. An upsurge in the killing brings a new concentration on the bad news. Someone from the Web forum DemocraticUnderground took the trouble to map the reports of violence in Iraq. He chose to track the phrase “recent surge in violence in Iraq.” In the past 31 months there have been 32 news stories reporting the “recent surge in violence” Some of those, of course, had to be referring to the same surge.
But the murder of even one person in the States usually merits more than one news story. That doesn’t leave much room on the front page or lead stories for good news about what is happening in Iraq.
During President Bush’s campaign to bring more people to his way of thinking, the phrase “we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here at home.” is voiced again and again. People proudly make this statement.
To choose a country whose people have for years suffered under the iron hand of a cruel dictator and the deprivations of sanctions by the victors of the Gulf War as the battleground of revenge for a terrorist attack in the U.S. I do not find admirable. Acknowledging that this is a different kind of war — more like fighting saboteurs than the charge of the Light Brigade — the U.S. has in essence said to the Iraqis, “Better your cities in rubble and your people victims of suicide bombers and collateral damage than the U.S.”
It made sense to send our troops to Afghanistan because that is where Bin Laden is. It even might have made sense to send them to Saudi Arabia to rout out the terrorists because that is where most of them came from. But Iraq was one of the few countries in the Middle East where there were no terrorists at least not until President Bush said, “Bring them on.” It would be the same as if the U.S. had chosen Costa Rica as the battleground for the Contras to fight the Communists in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador in the 80s. (Actually, I guess the U.S. was not fighting the death squads, it was helping to fight the rebels in El Salvador.)
Yes, I realize that Iraq was the home of a terrible dictator. And that our soldiers are prepared to fight and even die (as opposed to innocent Americans) but the thousands of Iraqi women and children were not prepared and they had nothing to do either with 9-11 or terrorism and I am ashamed every time someone says “Better there than here.”
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