Headlines ignore real story in Iraq (propaganda offensive)

[Barrett808]

I refer to it as "The Sentence" — the run-on, pile-on but still not complex enough sentence. It had a dramatic concept. Let the reader struggle through it and get an optic feel for the task Iraqis and Americans face in post-Saddam Iraq.

Here's the rhetorical bedlam as published in the Weekly Standard, Dec. 9, 2002:

"U.S. and allied forces liberating Iraq will attempt — more or less simultaneously — to end combat operations, cork public passions, disarm Iraqi battalions, bury the dead, generate electricity, pump potable water, bring law out of embittering lawlessness, empty jails of political prisoners, pack jails with criminals, turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens, rearm local cops who were once enemy infantry, shoot terrorists, thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers and black marketeers, fix sewers, feed refugees, patch potholes, get trash trucks rolling and accomplish all this under the lidless gaze of Peter Jennings and Al-Jazeera."

Quite a job. Guess what — six months after Saddam's fall, it's getting done. That's why al-Qaida's latest tape exhorts jihadis to attack. Terrorists are losing in Iraq, "the central battlefield."

Looming strategic success in Iraq runs counter to "if it bleeds it leads" headline coverage and commentary from Axis of Neville (Chamberlain) pundits. The headlines aren't false. Parts of Iraq are war zones, where fighting and dying continue. "Disarming" may take years. Saddam's filched billions and hidden weapons caches prop a flickering resistance. "Rearming" Iraq police is going too slowly.

Headlines, however, aren't the full story. Building goes on behind and around the bleeding, and that's the truly big news. Brick-by-brick creation isn't as sensational as bomb-by-bomb destruction, but brick-by-brick amounts to more. It's why in three years, give or take, Iraqis will have their own make-or-break chance to do something truly revolutionary — run an Arab democracy.

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