By Cliff Montgomery – Apr. 30th, 2011
Americans were told numerous lies as a justification for the fruitless nation-building of Iraq. Among those lieswas the boast that our armed forces invaded the Middle Eastern country to create a free nation.
No one should be surprised that this claim appears to have been one more lie.
“In February, in places like Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Tikrit, protesters took to the streets, intent onreform,” stated an Apr. 23rd Opinion piece by Nick Turse for the Middle Eastern news service Al Jazeera. Turseis an investigative journalist, historian, essayist, “the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and currently afellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute,” stated the news service.
Turse added that protesters were “focused on ending corruption and the chronic shortages of food, water,electricity and jobs,” but were “not [interested in] toppling the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.”
“The response by government security forces…was similar to that of other autocratic rulers around the region,”declared Turse. Iraq’s U.S.-backed forces “have arrested, beaten, and shot protesters, leaving hundreds deador wounded,” stated the journalist.
Iraqi forces now routinely work to crush freedoms of speech and of the press, “in the form of harassment,detention, and assaults on individual journalists, raids of radio stations, the offices of newspapers and pressfreedom groups,” according to Turse.
The Obama Administration essentially has ignored the repression and violence–in fact, the Pentagon’s topspokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq has gone so far as to praise “the same Iraqi units which eyewitnesses haveidentified as key players in the crackdown,” the reporter declared.
The U.S. Defense Department currently is focused on making Iraqi security forces even more ‘efficient’, byaiding in the creation of an intelligence and operations center watching the whole of Iraq, according to Turse.
The Pentagon also is providing that country’s forces with a better perception of social media’s democratic (andthus dangerous) power, according to Turse.
We would do well to remember that after invading Iraq in April 2003 on false pretenses, the BushAdministration spent about half a billion U.S. taxpayer dollars to create a ‘national press for Iraq’.
Of course, the real idea was to create a U.S.-friendly propaganda machine overseen by Iraqi allies on theground, as revealed by documents obtained and published by the National Security Archive, a privately-ownedgovernment watchdog group.
But against the Pentagon’s best efforts, something resembling a free press has broken out–here and there–inIraq. Hence the crackdown by Iraq’s storm troopers, and the uncritical praise from their proud U.S. governmentbackers.
