[NYTr] Green Zone, Red Zone: Still More on the NY Times's iraq Propaganda

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TomDispatch - Aug 1, 2007
http://www.tomdispatch.com/

More on the NYT's IRAQ  propagands

GREEN ZONE, RED ZONE

Tom Engelhardt

Under the headline, "A War We Just Might Win," the New York Times on 
Monday published an op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution and Kenneth Pollack, both referred to as critics of the way
the Bush Administration has "handled" the war in Iraq. (Pollack had, in
fact, been a major cheerleader for the Bush administration's invasion
in 2003.) After eight days in Iraq "meeting with American and Iraqi
military and civilian personnel," the two claimed "the debate in
Washington was surreal," and that "[w]e are finally getting somewhere
in Iraq, at least in military terms."

The President's surge plan, as carried out by General David Petraeus,
was, they added, working. Their carefully cobbled together formula for
where it might take American forces went like this: It had "the
potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable
stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."  They
concluded:  "[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of
Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least
into 2008."  Of course, O'Hanlon's and Pollack's ideas about what
"Iraqis could live with" and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to
differ somewhat.

Be that as it may, the Bush Administration--even though characterized
in the piece as having "lost essentially all credibility"--was
desperate enough to treat the event as a glowing ray of sunlight in the
gloom of night. According to Martha Raddatz of ABC News,

"The White House was thrilled with the op-ed piece because it 
concentrated on military progress and didn't say very much about the
lack of political progress. This is what the President has been trying
to push. The White House sent this op-ed piece out to the press corps,
anybody that would read it today. They are hoping this buys them more
time on the Hill for the surge to continue, but they've been hoping
that for a long time."

On that very day, the Iraqi Parliament adjourned for a more than 
month-long vacation without having passed a single major "benchmark"
urged on its legislators by either the Bush Administration or Congress
("'We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or
constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences
between the political factions have delayed the laws,' Kurdish lawmaker
Mahmoud Othman told Reuters."); the major Sunni faction in Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government was threatening to withdraw;  and
the Prime Minister himself was reportedly under challenge and in some
danger of being ousted by members of his own party.

And that was just the accompanying political news. On the day of the 
O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation
in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about eighty other aid 
agencies, gave the concept of "sustainable stability" some grim
meaning. In fact, the report--which the Administration did not rush to
pass out to a single reporter--added up to a functional definition of
Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a "nation" in
which an estimated 1 million families are now headed by widows. From
child malnutrition to "absolute poverty," large-scale unemployment to
an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O'Hanlon and
Pollack didn't meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report
estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is "in need of
emergency aid."

In fact, while Pollack and O'Hanlon met with the "known knowns" in the 
equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat,
spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in "Red
Zone" Baghdad.  ("Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a
reporter.") She even went from Red Zone to Green Zone Iraq once
to--like Pollack and O'Hanlon--have a meeting with General Petraeus.
("He met me in full combat gear. Between the first checkpoint and the
parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's
Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times.
I had come from the "red zone.")

 From Nivat, you get a very different picture of "sustainable" Iraq, a 
place, it turns out, where you're lucky to get one or two hours of 
electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130
degrees. Those with small generators that can make electricity are "the
most powerful people in every district." In one of the more upbeat
aspects of her tale, Nivat describes the rise of a new job category, a
"new breed of real-estate agents." They broker house or apartment
exchanges between Sunnis and Shiites being ethnically cleansed from
their present neighborhoods.  The parties agree to exchange abodes
"until the situation improves." The Shiite man, who took Nivat around
for her two weeks in Baghdad, in one of the more devastating quotes to
come out of the capital in recent times, told her: "My uncles and
cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get
rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I
would fall to my knees and kiss them!"

In the meantime, of course, the Bush Administration--with a helping
hand from O'Hanlon and Pollack--continues along a path guaranteed not
to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq's unsustainable
instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come.
General Petraeus is now publicly talking about "a large contingent of
[US] troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009" with no end to the
American occupation in sight. For all of them, from the President down
to the pundits, the thing that must be--and can't be--sustained is
what, in the Vietnam period, was known as "American credibility"  and
now might be thought of as an American position of dominance in the
Iraqi heartland of the energy heartlands of the planet. This is a
terrible imperial farce in support of a "surge" plan that, as
sociologist Michael Schwartz explains in "The Benchmarks That Matter,"
has already surged in directions too predictable and horrible for
sustenance.

[Tom Engelhardt runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular 
antidote  to  the  mainstream  media").  He  is  the co-founder of the 
American  Empire  Project  and,  most  recently, the author of Mission 
Unaccomplished:  Tomdispatch  Interviews with American Iconoclasts and 
Dissenters   (Nation  Books),  the  first  collection  of  Tomdispatch 
interviews.]