On Saturday, worldwide protests marking the two year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq drew hundreds of thousands of people. In New York City alone several thousand people marched from Harlem to Central Park in protest. Yet the U.S. mainstream media continues to downplay worldwide dissent.
For those not paying attention, here’s a brief recap pulled from articles I’ve del.icio.us-ed:
Since the United States invaded Iraq 21,100-39,300 Iraqi civilians and 1,511 U.S. troops were killed. (At least 108 people have died in U.S. custody in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with only a quarter of the cases have been investigated as possible U.S. abuse.) At lowest estimates, U.S. taxpayers have spent $200 billion dollars ($9 billion of which the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority cannot account for) on the illegal, immoral and unjustified war in Iraq. No Weapons of Mass destruction were found in Iraq. Halliburton overcharged the government and reaped the benefit of no-bid contracts.
Not surprisingly, as Greg Palast recently discovered, before the war there were two competing Secret US Plans for Iraq’s Oil, one crafted “within weeks” of Bush’s first taking office in 2001 (even before the September 11th attacks). Yet Bush asserted that there is no need to hold any of his officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in pre-war planning or managing the aftermath because U.S. voters have vindicated his decisions based on the results of presidential elections tainted by widespread minority disenfranchisement, lack of adequate voting machines, and questionable and unverifiable electronic voting results.
Will Joe American see any of this when he watches Fox news (or CBS, NBC, CNN, etc.) tonight? I doubt it. To learn some of what is actually happening in Iraq, check out Baghdad Burning, the weblog of a twenty-something Iraqi woman.
