Image, Reality and Chickenshit
March 24, 2008
This is what passes for journalism on CNN.
So according to this blonde, a measure of ‘progress’ in Iraq is that you can actually stand in the open with a helmet in the fortified Greenzone?
Middle East scholar Juan Cole writes:
The Green Zone was subjected to repeated mortar and rocket attacks on Sunday, which killed 1 American and 4 others inside, and at least a dozen on its edges (because those firing them were bad shots). The Green Zone is where the US Embassy and major Iraqi government buildings are. It had been a little safer recently, or at least the Pentagon was peddling that line to CNN during last week’s commemoration of the 5th anniversary of the war (see the CNN piece below). It is a measure of how the war objectives keep being defined down, that for the Green Zone to be relatively safe was trumpeted as an accomplishment. The “green zone” was always supposed to be safe, since it was heavily guarded and surrounded by blast walls. I take it that the US ceasefire with the Mahdi Army has actually broken down, in part because the US army and its Iraqi allies keep arresting commanders of the Mahdi Army. The Bush administration attitude has been, that’s not a truce, that’s an opportunity to make a bust.
So what is the Bush-Cheney junta’s response? Gen. David Patraeus, the man recently labelled an ‘ass-kissing little chickenshit’ by his former boss Admiral ‘Fox’ Fallon, rushed to pin the blame on Iran.
Fallon feared we were a border incident away from war with Iran. With Cheney’s (reportedly unfruitful) trip to the Middle East and this new development, could we be moving towards war again?
