Posted on 03/05/2006 10:45:36 AM PST by Kaslin
Reports that Iraq has descended into a civil war are not only not true - they're being promulgated by anti-war journalists eager to see U.S. efforts to establish a stable democracy in the country fail.
So says military analyst Ralph Peters, who just spent a week touring Baghdad with the 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
"I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it," Peters declared in his New York Post column on Sunday.
Instead, he reports: "I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by."
"Cheering our troops," he repeated.
Everywhere the 506th traveled, he said, the reception was warm. "No violence. None. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome."
Instead, said Peters, the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra - the alleged catalyst for the so-called civil war - has "caused popular support for the U.S. presence to spike upward."
"In place of the civil war that elements in our media declared, I saw full streets, open shops, traffic jams, donkey carts, Muslim holiday flags - and children everywhere, waving as our Humvees passed," he recalled.
"Even the clouds of dust we stirred up didn't deter them. And the presence of children in the streets is the best possible indicator of a low threat level."
So why is the U.S. press full of reports that Iraq is spinning into chaos?
Says Peters: Many journalists who pretend to be out on the streets of Baghdad getting the story are instead hiding out in their hotel rooms and getting their news from Iraqi stringers.
"And the Iraqi stringers have cracked the code," he explained. "The Americans don't pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad."
the facts be damned, the MSM will print what they want to print and declare, as they already have, Iraq a 1) disaster 2) lost cause 3) civil war 4) (insert term here)...
They don't care that the Iraqi people want us there, they don't care that the country is relatively thriving and they don't care that things are going well..they want a civil war dammit, and they mean to have one..
Washington DC has a higher per-capita murder rate than Baghdad.
The irony is that the left falls hook line and sinker for the lies the MSM spreads, and they think the president is stupid
Your quotation marks says it all, re George Wills
What is really happening is that Al Quada, Iranian an Srian forces are creating violence trying to start a civil war.
The "clueless left" isn't the problem as they strictly vote against Republicans.
It's the clueless SHeeple plopped in front of Reality TV that is their target.
Dang! Good point. A point that cannot be stressed enough. A point I've failed to keep in mind myself.
There are native insurgents to be sure, but Iraq is also under assault from external terror infiltrators. Virtually nobody confronts and digests that fact for what it means.
Yeah, but the clueless left ignores the fact that the terrorists who commit the outrageous acts are foreigners
According to the MSM the shiates just have to hit the fan sunni than later
I would very much appreciate it if you could find a reference to back that statement up (i.e. more murders in DC than in Baghdad). BTW DC had 262 murders in 2002 [in a city of about 600,000] (http://www.safestreetsdc.com/subpages/murdercap.html). Given the latest bombings, I doubt that is true anymore. You have a point, but I think the facts are not on our side lately.
If you listed half of the media myths out there, it would fill a volume the size of the Sears Roebuck catalog.
It's even worse than the Americans pay for bad news. In many cases, the Iraqi "stringers' are former Saddam loyalists so they are very happy to provide the "insurgent" viewpoint and, of course, our Tokyo Rose media is only too happy to buy it and peddle this to the folks back home.
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