Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Can we do two things at once?

The Resident says he can (although we know he can't even do one thing right), but the corporate media apparently cannot. One attack in London that killed 55 civilians dominated the front pages and the newscasts for days, and of course hurricane K has filled 90% of the news hole for two and a half weeks now.

The situation in Iraq, for which my store of adjectives fails me, is now apparently permanently relegated to page 17 of the Boston Globe, no matter what happens. I checked the web sites of ABC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. Two of the four (CBS and MSNBC) have headlined the events in Iraq yesterday, but the other two just have inconspicuous text links under the "world" category, as if this has nothing to do with us. The NYWT, to their credit, has headlined Iraq.

Even so, none of these appears to understand what is really going on there. The "Iraqi" troops working with the U.S. in Tal Afar are Kurdish and Shiite militias, attacking a town that consists predominantly of Sunni Turkomen. The Globe story yesterday (also in the back pages) described the fighting based on the Centcom press release. The last sentence of the story mentioned that thousands of the inhabitants are living in refugee camps. The horrific attacks today have been claimed as payback to the Shiites for the assault on Tal Afar -- which was also horrific, because it included dropping 500 pound bombs from airplanes, which killed unknown numbers of civilians. Doctors at the local hospital said they had seen 17 civilian corpses. However, this was not mentioned by most U.S. news media.

The Sunni Arab politicians who had been invited to participate in drafting the constitution have now finally rejected it, and are vowing to see it voted down in the October referendum. The political process in Iraq is failing and the country is descending into civil war and chaos. The security situation is worse and worse, and even the Green Zone is no longer fully defensible. For truth:

Today in Iraq


Juan Cole


Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (with a link list down the right that is truly painful to peruse).

I wonder when the Resident will take responsibility for that? That is, if the federal government has failed in any way.

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