as you read this, keep in mind how the u.s. media is deliberately making the situation in iraq out to be much worse than it is... ya, right...Ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi is the spiritual guide for the Virtue (Fadhila) Party, which has 15 seats in the federal parliament and controls the provincial council of Basra. He described Khalilzad as "a sectarian who favors the Sunnis" and said that his statements "lack amity and objectivity." He called on the Bush administration not to submit to the terrorists nor to fall into the snares of the sectarians and haters. He said that if the administration "wants to protect itself from failure and collapse, it must change its ambassador in Iraq."
[...]
Yaqubi said, "American administration figures have denied the existence of a sectarian war in Iraq. They are either misguided by statements lacking in objectivity and truthfulness sent back by the sectarian American ambassador in Iraq and his like, or they are deliberately denying this reality for more than one reason."
thank goodness we have someone like juan cole* who can monitor the iraqi press and give us a perspective that our own media who, even though they may be trying to present a clear picture of iraq, either can't won't provide under the withering assaults of bushco...
these people are no idiots... they see what's going on around them and have spelled it out quite well...When Ya`qubi's follower, a preacher at the Rahman mosque in Baghdad, read out these phrases, the congregation erupted with shouts of "God is Most Great!"
He said there were several possible reasons for which the Bush administration might want to deny the obvious outbreak of sectarian warfare in Iraq:
1. They don't want to admit their failure in Iraq for fear of damaging the reputation of the United States, and want to convince themselves and others that they have succeeded in protecting Iraqi citizens from tyranny, oppression, killing and expropriation, and have founded a true democracy in Iraq.
2. They are buying time in hopes of implementing their plans for sidelining the Shiite majority
3. Recognizing the true situation would force them to attempt to resolve it, which they do not want to do or are unable to do.
He said he could not understand how the Americans explain the dozens of innocents that show up dead every day in the streets and markets and elsewhere, for no other reason than that they are Shiites, if they are not victims of a sectarian war. How else to explain the destruction of holy shrines and the killing of pilgrims? How else to explain the mass expulsions of populations, affecting thousands of families, who have been threatened with death. If this massive displacement of people was going on anywhere else in the world, he said, it would be widely decried. But Shiites in Iraq getting kicked out of their homes in the thousands? Silence. He claimed that the number of persons killed in Iraq exceeds all the deaths in the Lebanese Civil War 1975-1989 (if he is taking the 100,000 figure suggested in Lancet, he is correct). If this is not a civil war, he asked, what is?
* Juan Cole Receives Aronson Award from Hunter CollegeThe James Aronson Award is presented annually to journalism that measures business, governmental and social affairs against clear ideals of the common good. Of particular interest is work examining persistent, systemic social problems. Winning stories might scrutinize discrimination, economic injustice, civil liberties, free expression, particularly as these issues are complicated in an era of globalization and terrorism.
The first Aronson Award for blogging is going to University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole for his Iraq War-related "Informed Comment" blog.
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