Check out this
information about Iraq, taken from the
Jerusalem Post
The full article is
here
One thing I noticed in Iraq was the missing body
parts. Not immediately. I spend most of my time in the Great
North Woods of New Hampshire and Quebec and, when you're in old
mill towns, it's not unusual to find yourself sitting at a lunch
counter with three codgers who can barely muster 10 fingers
between them.
So at first I didn't pay much attention to the missing digits
and missing limbs. It was the third missing ear I saw - in
Ramadi - that made me realize what was really going on. An ear's
a hard thing to lose. So's a tongue.
That's why I cannot share the "outrage" over Abu Ghraib of
some of the more excitable correspondents ("The Shaming of
America: George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's
torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now," according to my
chums at The Irish Times). More to the point, nor do most
Iraqis. Representatives of the Shi'ites and Kurds, who between
them account for four-fifths of the population, have said nary a
word. Ayatollah Sistani, the most prominent figure in the land
and a man who can cause the coalition serious trouble any time
he wishes, has let the matter lie.
And, as I endeavored to explain last week, most Americans
don't share the "outrage." A week later, they share it even
less. As Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, put it: "Why is it
that there's more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with
underwear on his head than over the video of a young American
with no head at all?"
That wouldn't, in normal circumstances, be a valid
comparison. If you go to the hospital in Dublin or Rotterdam and
they botch the operation, it's no consolation to be told that
it's better treatment than you'd have got in the Sudan. You want
your health care to be measured against London, Geneva,
Vancouver - not Chad and Rwanda. But for Iraqis, this is the
only comparison that matters - pre-April 2003 vs post-April
2003.
The best rule of politics is this: Don't make the perfect the
enemy of the good.
Is the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq perfect? No.
Is it good? Yes.
Was Saddam Hussein's rule perfect? No.
Was it good? No.
This shouldn't be a tough call. But, shortly after the
liberation, the bespoke apologists for the Middle East's thug
regimes and the more depraved "peace activists" in Europe set
themselves a tall order - to prove that the Iraqis were better
off under Saddam. At first, they confined this proposition to
matters such as drinking water. When some of us pointed out that
the potable water supply in Iraq is now double what it was
pre-war, or that health care funding is 25 times larger than it
was a year ago, Europe's Saddamite cheerleaders gave up this
line of attack. It was always rather boring and technocratic,
anyway. So now they've got right down to basics - not potable
water but "torture." Why, Bush is torturing just as many Iraqis
as Saddam did!
The Shia and Kurds know better than to go along with this. No
doubt the average American network anchor or New York Times
columnist wouldn't want to be led around naked with Victoria's
Secret knickers on their heads by some freaky West Virginia
slut. But I'll bet they'd take it any day over being thrown off
a four-story building or having their fingers cut off one by one
or being castrated without anesthetic or being beheaded while
the men around you sing "Happy birthday, Saddam." Video and
photographic material exists of all the above being performed on
Arabs and Kurds.
Readers may recall that last year I wrote about a Canadian
female journalist questioned to death by the Iranians. Some
British businessmen were brutally tortured by the Saudis. Bad
luck, old man. But nobody's fired because nobody cares. By
comparison, post-Saddam Iraq is a novelty - an Arab country
where state torture is investigated and its perpetrators
punished.
But let's go to the next stage. What do the "Bush's boast
rings hollow" crowd want for Iraq? Usually, they want the UN to
take over.
Is the UN perfect? No.
Is the UN good? Well, I'm not sure I'd even say that. But if
you object to what's going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures - the
sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast
army of extras in their guards' porno fantasies - then you might
want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.
In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission
of, among other offences, pedophilia. In Cambodia, UN troops
fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty
International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided
over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young
as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service
international peacekeepers.
In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before
the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels
with underage girls living as captives. The 2002 Save the
Children report on the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal
in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers' demanding
sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for
biscuits and cake powder. "What is particularly shocking and
appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting
the local population have actually become perpetrators," said
Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch.
By now you're maybe thinking, "Hmm. I must have been on
holiday the week the papers ran all those stories about 'The
Shaming of the UN.'"
In the last few days, The Daily Mirror has had to concede
that their pictures of members of the Queen's Lancashire
Regiment committing atrocities are all fakes. The Boston Globe
has admitted that their pictures of US troops sexually abusing
Iraqi women are also phony. The Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation has apologized for claiming that Israel was
implicated in the events at Abu Ghraib. Why would these
big-media fact-checked-to-death news operations get suckered so
easily? Because, to the great herd of independent minds, these
stories conform to their general view that all the ills of the
world can be laid at the door of Bush, Blair, and Sharon.
Are the media perfect? No.
Are the media good? After these last two weeks, I think I'll
pass on that one.
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