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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (221382)	3/2/2005 1:06:03 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573073

Out of context, lists of presumptive triumphs in Iraq By PIERRE TRISTAM ESSAYS Last update: March 01, 2005 Most of us get them, those e-mails promising bushels of porn, the end of impotence, permanently flaccid mortgage rates or lucrative friendships with wayward African princes seeking bank accounts to bunk with. It's harmless clutter. It's also a reminder that marketing sugared in smut and guile always finds an audience, otherwise its retailers wouldn't keep at it. So it's natural for the merchants of Operation Iraqi Freedom to hitch their pipeline to our in-boxes. They sell porn of a different kind -- the pornography of war as a beautiful thing, as an orgy of good news the media just won't show because, as one incensed e-mail has it, "a Bush-hating media and Democratic Party would rather see the world blow up than lose their power." (If it's possible for the propagandist to find good news in Iraq it must be equally possible to find a Democrat still in power in the United States.) The good-news e-mails show little Iraqi kids holding up signs that say "Thank you very much Mr. Bush" or matronly women doing the same with "Iraqi people happy today," pictures of American soldiers cradling olive-skinned kids and showering them with school supplies, and similarly posed presumptions of triumph that reproduce President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" sketch on the USS Abraham Lincoln almost two years ago, but on location. The pictures are a counterweight to the "isolated" bad news the media obsesses over, those images of torture, bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, maiming and killing of Americans and Iraqis alike. Isolation has its toll: Doubtless, some time this week the 1,500th American soldier will be killed in Iraq -- "Thank you very much Mr. Bush" -- and some time this month the 11,000th American will be wounded, disfigured, mutilated and either returned to duty for another crack at making Iraqis happy or returned home to a lifetime subscription to PTSD. Still, it must be a good thing. Here's the latest variant of lists making their way across the Internet since 2003: "Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq? Did you know that the Iraqi government employs 1.2 million people? Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq? Did you know that 25 Iraqi students departed for the United States in January 2004 for the re-established Fulbright program?" And so on. The stuff is written simply and factually, but in that bullying tone of self-evidence that omits the relevance of evidence -- context, proof, explanation, perspective. How many of those embassies are basement annexes to the same obscure countries sharecropping their way to American favors as part of the "Coalition of the Willing"? What's the use of a government employing 1.2 million people if it can't pay them? How many of those Band-aided schools were wrecked by American bombs? Twenty-five students from Iraq are studying in American universities on Fulbright scholarships for the first time in 14 years. But American sanctions had something to do with keeping them out so long. And in the spirit of the Fulbright program's aim to foster "mutual understanding" between nations, it would be newsworthy if American students were lining up to study in Iraq. They're not. It's pointless to get caught up in the game. Entire Web sites are devoted to verifying some claims and, unfortunately, debunking most. Unfortunately, because no one should be cheering against good news. But a war costing $2 billion a week -- or $4,000 per Iraqi per year -- had better yield some results worth cheering about other than the Fallujah-style flattening of cities, the surrender of much of the country to anarchy, or a hemorrhage of American tax-dollars that will eventually make the United Nations' $67 billion oil-for-food scandal look quaint in comparison. True, there's a lack of honest reporting. But the unreported scandal from this end is that the investment in deficit-digging tax-dollars is yielding so little return except for the contractors and mercenaries in on the loot. The unreported tragedy from the Iraqi perspective is that the investment in lives is yielding still nothing more than finger-paint parodies of democracy. We'd be better off going home and sending every Iraqi man, woman and child a $4,000 annual check. Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net. news-journalonline.com