Wasn't it great to see Iraq get attention from the US press last week?
Great to hear about, for example, the protest above, Friday, in Adamiyah Baghdad.
What's that?
You didn't hear about that?
Friday, on the 'international hour' of The Diane Rehm Show, you heard about Iraq. Or you heard the disgusting Susan Glasser (Foreign Policy Magazine) name check Iraq over and over as she argued for US combat in Syria. It takes a War Whore . . .
to keep us all ignorant.
How pathetic. The tenth anniversary and Diane Rehm couldn't even do a show on it -- not by herself, not with guest hosts.
It's not as if her audience didn't want it.
When Diane did yet another softball interview with Carole King, her listeners wanted to know why Carole had never spoken out against the Iraq War. Now some of the calls that didn't get put through weren't going to get put through. Accusing Carole of being for the illegal war because she was Jewish was making an assumption without any basis. But those who were calling in and just wanting to know why Carole, the peace queen, never uttered a war about the Iraq War?
Though the many calls never made it on air, it did come up in the comments left at Diane's site.
That's not surprising, as Kat observed in 2006:
But what Living Room finally drives home is that the whole thing, the entire career, may have been pretend. That's why I hated it so much. 1975, when it would have been safe for our peaceful, easy feeling King to make a statement regarding Watergate or Vietnam, she's off doing a children's album (Really Rosie). Before that, when record buyers had turned against the war but elites and pols still hadn't in large numbers, she was offering her "Been to Canaan" type songs (toss in "Brother, Brother"). They gave the appearance of someone with beliefs. But maybe someone with real beliefs would have actually written about what was going on in the country? So the army withdrew from Vietnam and suddenly King had a lot to say. Nothing specific but more on the mark than anything she'd written (or recorded in cases where she recorded others' lyrics) while the war was raging.
Or as Ava and C.I. noted in their review of Carole's awful book, "Carole's anti-war stance is only with regards to Vietnam. She makes no comment on the Iraq War though she does let you know she's pro-tsunami relief, pro-Haiti relief and pro-Hurricane Katrina relief -- she supports all the easy and non-controversial causes."
This month, you heard a ton about Iraq.
But little of it applied to what was going on.
Few were concerned about the protesters or the attacks on them. In Mosul and Falluja, for example, Nouri's forces have shot activists to death. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations have condemned this.
You didn't hear about that.
You didn't hear about how Nouri has no Minister of Defense. Awarded (by the US White House) a second term in 2010, he was supposed to appoint a Minister of Defense. In the US, Chuck Hagel is the Secretary of Defense. One of the reasons he is that already is because the press was able to hand wring over how the US might be left vulnerable if Hagel wasn't confirmed because Leon Panetta really wanted to step down already.
But in Iraq, for three years now, there's been no Minister of Defense.
Or take Tareq al-Hashemi. Do you know who he is?
Iraq's Sunni Vice President. Where is he?
Currently in Turkey because Nouri al-Maliki began attacking him, tortured al-Hashemi's bodyguards (including one tortured to death) to give 'confessions' against him and then had the kangaroo court in Baghdad convict him of 'terrorism.'
Iraq is the only country in the world with a sitting Vice President who has been convicted for 'terrorism.'
Iraq is the only country in the world with a sitting Vice President who has been sentenced to death.
Is this a functioning government?
No, this is a failed state.
And that's what's driven Iraqis -- 10% of the country's population, in fact -- to take to the streets in protest, week after week, for months now.
Maybe some day, the US press will find time to address that?