>> Site Map >> News
Why you are not hearing any reports out of Iraq?
#114 - 0--spud--Why you are not hearing any reports out of Iraq?--2008-07-08 08:28:00
#It's simple........the news is great and the Democrats do not know how to spin it.
Moderate liberal pundit Mickey Kaus has a rule of the thumb about
news from Iraq. If only foreign newspapers print it, the news must be
good.
The New York Times mentioned in a story June 21 that Mosul, Iraq's
third largest city, was "in the midst of a major security operation."
So what happened?
Marie Colvin of the Times of London had an answer Sunday: "American
and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaida in Iraq out of its last redoubt
in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most
spectacular victories of the war on terror."
Al Qaida was making its "last stand" in Mosul, and now is done,
finished, kaput, said Ms. Colvin, who was embedded with the 2nd Iraqi
Division for Operation Lion's Roar.
The victory is so complete that Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said
Saturday his government has defeated the terrorists in Iraq. Defeated.
Past tense.
Major General Mark Hertling, who commands U.S. troops in northern
Iraq, wouldn't go that far. But he told Ms. Colvin: "I think we're at
the irreversible point."
Not a word about this "spectacular victory" appeared in the
Washington Post or the New York Times Sunday, or on the evening network
newscasts. The New York Times did run a story on the front page Monday
about an "epic battle," but it was about a tennis match at Wimbledon.
Few American newspaper readers learned that on Saturday the last of
550 metric tons of yellowcake was shipped from Iraq to a firm in
Canada. Yellowcake is milled uranium oxide, the raw material from which
nuclear bombs are made.
According to Norman Dombey, professor of
theoretical physics at the University of Sussex in England, the
yellowcake shipped from Iraq was enough to make 142 nuclear bombs.
Apparently, Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was rather more
than a figment of Dick Cheney's fevered imagination.
"This is a big deal," the New York Sun said in an editorial Monday.
"Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear
power. Saddam Hussein had already invaded Kuwait, launched missiles
into Israeli cities, and harbored a terrorist group, the PKK, hostile
to America's NATO ally, Turkey. To leave this nuclear material sitting
around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam and the same corrupt
United Nations that failed to stop the genocide in Darfur and was
guilty of the oil-for-food scandal would have been too big a risk."
But it wasn't a big enough deal to make it beyond the newsbriefs
section of most of those few newspapers which chose to report it.
Evidence Saddam possessed enough material to build more than a hundred
nuclear bombs undermines the media meme that he had no WMD, so it's not
a story many journalists wish to revisit, new evidence or no.
On the Fourth of July, 1,215 U.S. servicemen and women re-enlisted
in the largest re-enlistment ceremony ever, conducted by Gen. David
Petraeus in one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad. Only a handful of
newspapers here mentioned it.
The Times of London noted Gen. Petraeus, the guy Democrats last year
were insinuating was a liar, "beats mega-star Angelina Jolie as Iraq
crowd-puller."
Gen. Petraeus, wrote James Hider, "is in such demand for photographs
that his aides have had to organize special mass photo-ops every six
weeks inside the Green Zone and at the other huge U.S. base at Baghdad
airport."
The vast improvement in the military situation is so obvious even
Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa), the most comically hysterical of the war
critics in Congress, acknowledged it in an interview with Pittsburgh's
KDKA TV July 3. But political progess isn't being made, he said.
That's not true.
When Democrats took control of Congress in 2007,
they set 18 "benchmarks" to measure the security, political and
economic progress. On July 2, in response to a request from a
Democratic representative from North Carolina, the U.S. embassy
reported the Iraqi government has met all but three.
Progress is even greater than the report indicated, because though
the Iraqi parliament hasn't passed laws to share oil revenues or to
disarm militias, the government is sharing oil revenues, and largely
has disarmed the militas.
Stories about this report, you'll not be surprised to learn, were
buried in the inside pages of newspapers which, last September, had
splashed on the front page the more critical initial report. - --comments-->38--998--1
