Tuesday, October 04, 2011

The lost hopes and the lost coverage

The Star-Gazette reports 21-year-old "Spc Matthew Rosekrans underwent his fourth surgery Monday morning at a military hospital in Germany" and that he and three others in his unit were wounded in the attack Thursday which claimed the life of Spc Adrian Mills. Few bothered to report on that death and those who did treated it as if Adrian Mills was the only one present. If you're not getting how fat and lazy the press has become, grasp that they had weeks of opportunity to report on the fact that DoD wasn't making death announcements but they didn't report on it. And having failed to do their job on that, when the end of the month rolled around, they couldn't report on the monthly death toll because how do you explain 4 deaths when you only mentioned two?

The Iraq War has not ended. The coverage has. I keep getting e-mails about my 'war 'on Al Jazeera. If you don't blindly worship Qatar state television, you are, apparently, at war with it. And, according to e-mails, my war with it keeps me from noting their coverage. No, I don't note their coverage because they have none. Their 'reports' are based on and credited to "Agencies." Their Iraq staff? In Syria. This is a great deal like when Nori al-Maliki objected to the government of Qatar about Inside Iraq and Al Jazeera pulled the host from the program and then quickly cancelled it. (The host was allowed to do the last show.)

NPR has no Iraq coverage.

It's really amazing. The war hasn't ended. But the interest certainly has. Although that should really be 'the pretense of interest.' And we can tell those press tales another day.


Al Mada reports on a new Gallup poll which finds more Iraqis are saying their economy is getting worse. In 2010, 20% said the economy was getting worse. Now it has risen to 37%. And this after the Iraqi government's highly publicized check to Lockheed Martin for $1.5 billion (a down payment on F-16s). In addition, two-thirds of Iraqis say that it is a bad time to find employment. Al Sabaah insists that the interests of the people is dependent upon the political blocs. The country is currently in Political Stalemate II which has already lasted longer than Political Stalemate I. Today the political blocs are supposed to meet up at Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's home in an attempt to end the stalemate.

Al Mada notes that there is hope the "crisis" (their term) will be resolved this evening at 6:00 p.m. Iraqi time when the meet-up starts.

And maybe it will. But the meet-up wasn't the problem or the solution before. The meet-up in Political Stalemate I resulted in the Erbil Agreement which all the political blocs agreed to. It allowed Nouri al-Maliki to remain prime minister despite the fact that his political slate came in second in the elections. But as soon as Nouri secured his own fate, he tossed aside the Erbil Agreement and has refused to honor it despite calls from the Kurds, Iraqiya and the National Alliance.

In other words, the meet-up may go well, everyone may smile and nod and agree. But what happens after the meet-up and how is anyone supposed to trust that this time Nouri will honor the agreement?



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