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Iraq Is A Hell-Disaster

excerpts from a report by Robert Fisk. June 23, 2005

Condoleezza Rice says she wants more Arab ambassadors in Baghdad. I bet she does. When King Abdullah of Jordan promises to send his man to Iraq "as soon as it is safe", you know that the Arabs have understood the situation in a way the Americans have not. Who wants to be a late ambassador? Who wants to put his head on the block in Baghdad?

The reality -- unimaginable for the Americans and their self-deluding allies, tragic for the Iraqis themselves -- is that Iraq is a hell-disaster.

We are to be, so the myth-makers of Brussels claimed yesterday, "a full partner in the emergence of a new Iraq", to prove that "the people of Iraq have plenty of friends". Oh yes indeed. Except that most of these "friends" dare not visit Iraq lest they have their heads chopped off.

American journalists now writing optimistically about the war -- or the "insurgency" as we still insist on calling it -- either travel with US forces in Iraq or conduct a form of "hotel journalism" from their heavily guarded Baghdad hotel rooms, working their mobile phones to talk to the self-imprisoned people of Iraq or their foreign mentors. A few American reporters still venture out -- but the voice that now speaks of Iraq is that of officialdom, the narrative written by men and women who will, so they fervently hope, never have to visit real Iraq.

The reality is that Iraq is more insecure than ever, that no foreigner dare now travel its highways, that few will venture into the streets of Baghdad.

You have been reading excerpts from "We shelter behind the myth that progress is being made" by Robert Fisk. You can find the entire article here: informationclearinghouse.info/article9247.htm. Thanks to informationclearinghouse.info for this and much else.

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