Iraq Watching the TV news nowadays is like watchi…
Iraq
Watching the TV news nowadays is like watching presenters of a childrens? show trying to explain international politics. You know what they say is only half-true, but, well, it?s for the kids, isn?t it? One can?t expect more. So, over to Jenny with news of Princess Margaret ...
But at least there are some journalists out there with the courage to tell it how it is. In the New Statesman, John Pilger reports on the obscenity that is Tony Blair?s policy on Iraq. He writes:
?At its centre is the unerring, wilful destruction of a whole society, Iraq, the aim of which is to keep the regime in Baghdad weak enough to be influenced by the west and yet strong enough to control its own people. This is longstanding Anglo-American policy. Contrary to the propaganda version about protecting Iraq's ethnic peoples, the objective is to prevent a Kurdish secession in the north and the establishment of a Shi'ite religious state in the rest of the country, while maintaining the west's dominance of the region and its access to cheap oil.?
He goes on to report specific atrocities, unreported by the BBC or ITN, such as
?the killing of Iraqi civilians by RAF and American aircraft in the 'no-fly zones'. In a five-month period surveyed by the UN Security Sector, almost half the casualties were civilians. I interviewed eyewitnesses to one of the attacks described in the UN report. A shepherd family of six - a grandfather, the father and four children - were killed by a British or American pilot, who made two passes at them in open desert. Pieces of the missile lay among the remains of their sheep. United Nations staff - not the Iraqi government - confirmed in person the facts of this atrocity. The Blair government has spent ?800m bombing Iraq.?
Looks like a job for the new International Criminal Court.
Perhaps, but how is Princess Margaret?
