Hooray for the independent journalist
I just watched a video made about a week ago of a speech by Dahr Jamail, an
independent journalist I've been following since the start of the Iraq war.
He reminds me of my long time friend, Fred Blonder, but from many decades
ago when Fred was Dahr's age.
Dahr Jamail grew up in Texas of Lebanese heritage, and has written stories
for most of the major progressive publications like The Nation, Mother
Jones, NY Times etc. He's been one of my sources who write from inside Iraq.
If you don't want to devote 41 minutes to watching the speech he gave in a
Dorchester, Maine Unitarian church, let me give you it to you in a nutshell.
Why is our media, even under Obama, still not giving Americans an accurate
picture on the Iraq war?
Here's what's really happening in Iraq. Violence has been reduced to about a
dozen or so killings a week, bombs are still going off almost every day,
unemployment is soaring up to 70%. people are begging everywhere, Fallujah
looks as bad as it did at the end of the siege, over a million Iraqis are
dead from causes directly attributed to the invasion, there's hardly any
potable water, and electricity is about 2 hours a day in most places.
The Surge is hardly responsible for the decrease in violence, and even the
U.S. military admits the Awakening Councils are the major reason the
violence is down. Who are they? They are the guys we've previously known as
the 100,000 strong, insurgent fighters, mostly Iraqis, some al Qaeda, who
are now on the U.S. payroll. Each fighter gets $300 per week, and the boss
sheiks, mostly gangster "John Giotti types" get weekly payoffs from the U.S.
military, in cash, on pallets stacked with $100 bundles of tightly packed
bills. These guys are in the "Construction" business for "rebuilding" Iraq,
but there's no construction anybody can notice being done.
Sheik Abdul Sattar (since rubbed out by
rivals) was a Sunni tribal chief of the Rishawi tribe of 40,000 strong who
added to his power by pulling together a coalition of 25 more tribes known
as the AAnbar Salvation Council" and while the U.S. propaganda machine
presents them as Iraqis determined to fight against al Qaeda, they are
actually Sunnis engaged in tribal conflict with other Sunnis, not unlike the
legendary crime families of the Bonnano, Columbo, Gambino, Genovese, and
Lucchese etc. fighting over territory that stretched from Cleveland to the
northeastern U.S. By the way, Sattar's face, was a common sight on Iraqi TV,
played up as an "anti-terrorist" fighter.
When four years ago Allawi said he wanted to offer amnesty to the resistance
fighters, the Americans said OK, but not to anyone who has killed an
American, the idea never got anywhere because Iraqis weren't about to suffer
the humiliation of valuing an American life over that of an Iraqi. When
General Petreaus took over, that stupid policy was dumped, and he started
hiring tribal chiefs to fight with us instead of against us or among
themselves.
Now when you take the bulk of the resistance in numbers like 100,000 that
rival the size of the entire U.S. military force in Iraq, and bribe them to
stop attacking, you are going to have a serious effect on the occupation,
with or without the so called "Surge".
The Maliki governments doesn't trust them in much the same manner as J.
Edgar Hoover wouldn't trust a peace deal with the Mafia, so needless to say
he's reluctant to hire them as part of the government forces, despite the
fact that Americans would provide their paychecks. We have the proverbial
"tiger by the tail" situation and I haven't a clue as to how it will
eventually play out.
All this has very little to do with the powder keg sitting in Kurdistan.
That situation has been hanging fire since the start of the occupation when
the Kurds announced in no uncertain terms, that although they would
cooperate temporarily, their eventual goal was to be independent from
Baghdad. The Peshmerga are well armed and well trained.
Obama, as you might well imagine, is very familiar with all the above, and
in my opinion we should just walk away from it all because, like it or not,
we don't have the wherewithal to fix the mess we created.
There are lots of Iraqis who speak English, watch satellite TV shows from
the U.S., and many who go on the internet at the internet cafes, but even
though most don't, the Iraqis talk about the U.S. all the time, as you can
imagine they would.
So they know how we Americans are living. They know we barely pay attention
to how they're living because we are too involved with our own existence,
8.1% unemployment, Obama, sports and Britney Spears. They know more about
what is happening in America, than we know about their daily hardships. They
suffer the daily ongoing deprivations of their country which has been
totally trashed by our military. And they can see that we don't give a shit.
You can imagine how pissed they must be when we tell the world how we freed
them from oppression.
— Jack Slack.