This goes along with a point I made yesterday about how little support you actually saw for Saddam via the media. The Saddam regime was really keeping a stranglehold on the images coming out of Iraq—but who didn't know that.
Now they tell us. When their "minders" from the Hussein regime didn't show up on Wednesday morning, three reporters conceded the minders had inhibited them from telling the truth about what was happening in Baghdad and the real level of support for Hussein.
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"There were people whipping up support for President Saddam Hussein in front of your cameras everywhere you went."
Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has reported on what appears to be storage facility for weapon grade plutonium. There's still testing that needs to be done, but local farmers in the area referred to this location as where the "missle water" was.
"It's amazing," said Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist. "I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material."
However, Tannous Basil, a 47-year-old cardiologist in Sidon, Lebanon, said Saddam's regime was a "dictatorship and had to go."
"I don't like the idea of having the Americans here, but we asked for it," he said. "Why don't we see the Americans going to Finland, for example? They come here because our area is filled with dictatorships like Saddam's."
I read this article last night and found it very interesting. There's lots of good quotes from Arabs in the area (mostly from surrounding countries to Iraq.) We have to be very aware of the perception of the citizens in the area and they have to feel confident that this War wasn't about gaining American control. Will everyone in the Middle East change their opinion, no, but you can't expect them too. It takes a long time for society perception to change—but it can change, and we've taken the first step.
We (as Americans) also have to realize this is going to be long process. It's not going to be over today, not a month from now and not a year from now. It takes a long time for a country to adapt to a democracy—especially when the people have been living in poverty. The problem is the people who have money tend to have power and a introducing a democracy into a dictatorship typically affects the people who had money under the dictatorship—and nobody likes to give up their money or their power. This is going to take a while and their will be ups and downs. You just need to have faith that this is the best thing in the long run for the Iraqi people.
I just got back from lunch—I went home to play with the puppy for awhile —and got to watch a bit of the news. I was really struck by the shear number of Iraqi people celebrating in the streets.
I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past to friends and family. When you've watched the news coverage on Iraq over the past 30 days or so, you'll notice that anytime they show a group of Saddam supporters, it consisted of 20-70 people—most of which are fully armed and in some kind of military guard (not necessarily official military garb, but military non the less.) Even the recent footage of Saddam walking around the streets of Baghdad, there were were still less than 70 people surrounding him. Granted, the camera man would try to be creative by standing in the middle of the crowd making it look bigger, but really it was quite a small crowd of supporters.
Now all the sudden the streets are laden with thousands (and tens of thousands) of Iraqi citizens all cheering and celebrating Saddam's regime being brought down in Baghdad. This tells me that without a doubt, the citizens of Iraqi are glad we're there and are happy for this liberation operation.
"Let me remind the Americans. Those who are now greeting and kissing you in Baghdad are the same people who yesterday were burning Bush pictures and shouting support for Saddam," the bank director said. "Those same people, who were exhausted by wars and sanctions, will have another say when they will discover that the U.S. is an occupying force."
I think it's very important that the U.S. makes it clear that we're not an "occupying force." While I think we have to stick around to help Iraq out (we can't just leave like we did when we were in Afghanistan in the 80s,) we also have to be very conscientious about how we come across.
If the U.S. appears to be anti-Muslim or pro-Israeli, we will really ignite the fires of all the anti-Americans. If handled correctly, we have the opportunity to make ourselves appear in a better light to the people of the Middle East. If they can see we only came to Iraq to help the Iraqi citizens gain freedom, I think that may go along way to defusing the growing faction of anti-American propaganda.
A U.S. Air Force warplane dropped four enormous bombs Monday on a residential complex where "extremely reliable" intelligence indicated that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and one or both of his sons were attending a meeting, senior administration officials told NBC News. The sources would not rule out the possibility that Saddam could have moved before the bomber struck, but they said it was likely that he and his sons were dead.
U.S. forces near Baghdad found a weapons cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons, the U.S. news station National Public Radio reported on Monday.- Reuters
U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound on Sunday after tests by a mobile laboratory confirmed evidence of sarin nerve gas. More than a dozen soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division had been sent earlier for chemical weapons decontamination after they exhibited symptoms of possible exposure to nerve agents.
The review showed that I did indeed break one of the rules related to embedment. I'm sorry that it happened and I assure you that it was inadvertent. Nobody was hurt by what I said. No mission was compromised.
Does anyone really think that Geraldo wasn't aware of what he was saying? Geraldo carefully calculates everything he says and I'm sure he knew all to well that what he was saying was in violation of the rules set up by the Pentagon. The problem is, he doesn't care about the consequences, just being in the spotlight. I'm just glad that 101st Airborne unit wasn't ambushed (although I'm sure they adjusted their plans accordingly.)
Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.
CNN has put together an impressive 3D gallery of some of the Military vehicals being used in the War in Iraq.
Thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote, unidentified liquid and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare were found by U.S. troops at an industrial site south of Baghdad, a U.S. officer said.
Reuters reported that U.S. troops also found a second site containing vials of unidentified liquid and white powder. A U.S. officer said the site was close to the other plant, at the Latifiyah industrial complex, about 25 miles south of Baghdad, where soldiers had found the other vials and manuals.
After he saw Lynch slapped, the lawyer slipped into her room at the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah and told her, "Don't worry." Then he walked six miles to the nearest U.S. Marines and told them where she was.
An LA Times photographer was fired today after using Photoshop to alter a picture he'd taken. He combined the results of two pictures taken just seconds apart. Even though I can understand why the photographer probably thought the merging of the two photos wasn't a big deal in this case, this is very dangerous ground and I think the LA Times did the right thing. People are accustomed to taking things in print with a grain of salt, but we're much more likely to believe what we see with our eyes. In todays computer aided world, it's very easy to manipulate a photo to the point where only the best trained eyes can tell the photo has been altered. I guess the lesson here, you can't always believe your eyes...
In an editor's note in Wednesday editions, the Times said photographer Brian Walski acknowledged in a phone call from Iraq that he had used a computer to combine elements of two photos to improve the composition.
I'm always a sucker for stories about animals who help to save people.
Explosives sniffer dog Buster unearthed a hidden cache of arms from an enemy camp in the southern Iraqi village of Safwan writes Nick Parker of The Sun, in this shared report from the front line.- Sky News