Meanwhile, back on the East Coast...

While the L.A. Times finally put some focus on the massive Iraqi death toll, the N.Y. Times keeps looking at the country it helped destroy (remember Judy "boo" Miller) through rose-colored glasses:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 25 — Enrollment in Iraqi schools has risen every year since the American invasion, according to Iraqi government figures, reversing more than a decade of declines and offering evidence of increased prosperity for some Iraqis.

Despite the violence that has plagued Iraq since the American occupation began three years ago, its schools have been quietly filling. The number of children enrolled in schools nationwide rose by 7.4 percent from 2002 to 2005, and in middle schools and high schools by 27 percent in that time, according to figures from the Ministry of Education.

The increase, which has greatly outpaced modest population growth during the same period, is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy landscape of bombs and killings that have shattered community life in many areas in western and central Iraq. And it is seen as an important indicator here in a country that used to pride itself on its education system, then saw enrollment and literacy fall during the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule.

The rest of the article is packed with statistics and personal anecdotes about kids going back to school. Isn't that sweet? Hey, maybe that's the solution to truancy in our own public schools: Bomb the inner cities! Let's see... on a per-capita basis, about 20,000 Chicagoans will have to be sacrificed on behalf of this "Reading is Fundamental - Seriously" campaign.

The report uses a framework which absolves the U.S. of responsibility for the sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (which was just fine by Clinton's Secretary of State):

In many ways, the increase is a measure of how far Iraq had fallen. Iraq was one of the most educated countries in the Middle East in the 1970's. *** But enrollment began to fall significantly in the 1980's, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and only worsened during the period of international economic penalties that were imposed after Mr. Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. ***
Much of the decline in the education system that happened in the last years of Mr. Hussein's government came as a result of an economic downturn during the era of international penalties on Iraq. As the country grew poorer in the 1990's, the numbers of working children went up.
[emphasis added]

The penalties were "international," and the country just "grew poorer." Apparently the U.S. didn't have any policies towards Iraq until the 2003 invasion, when things got better:

Teachers and administrators interviewed in four Iraqi cities said their classrooms were more full than they had ever been — a continuation of a pattern they began to see just months after the American invasion in 2003, when class sizes began swelling again. [emphasis added]

Again and again, bad things just "happen" or are attributed to "international" forces, while readers are reminded about the evilness of the former Iraqi leader:

The increase has pointed out many of the infrastructure problems that plague the country. Hussein al-Rifaii, a former high school teacher and political prisoner under Mr. Hussein who is now the general director of schools in eastern Baghdad, said the country needed approximately 5,000 new schools, an increase of almost 50 percent.

Infrastructure problems "plague the country" - you know, like a natural case of locusts. And it has to be noted that al-Rifaii was a political prisoner, lest we forget the "liberating" effect of the invasion.

So the kids who have survived the U.S. assault on Iraq are going back to school - while job opportunities are being created daily:

The official who helped prepare the statistics for this article was assassinated this month.

(NOTE: The LA Times and NY Times do not have common ownership.)

It's about time

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for putting Iraqi casualties front and center:

BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.
The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Not a perfect article -- it should have mentioned the Lancet study (pdf) and Les Robert's estimate of 100,000-300,000 deaths -- but it's a good start.

Send a letter to their editor, as I did:

Thank you for the article by Louise Roug and Doug Smith on the Iraqi death toll. For over three years the media has been virtually silent about the primary victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. These casualties cannot be diminished as "collateral damage," since there are no valid targets in an illegal war. I hope you will follow up with stories about these victims and how their communities have been impacted, in the same way such stories are told regarding much smaller-scale tragedies involving U.S. citizens (e.g., Sept. 11, 2001).

UPDATE: The LA Times published my letter.

Two Funny

The Daily Show on "dickishness" & the Colbert Report on snake marriage

I knew UofC students were special, but...

it's cruel to make them ride the short bus.

Over 100,000 dead Iraqis can't be wronged

Norman Solomon takes on the "liberal" media:

"The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the "barbaric murders" were totally appropriate.
The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don't talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military -- as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

Better killing through technology!
It also avoids those high laundry bills when mass homicide is done by less "civilized" means.

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians -- as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers' war. (What would we say if, in our own community, the police force killed shoppers every day by spraying blocks of stores with machine-gun fire -- while explaining that the action was justifiable because no innocents were targeted and their deaths were an unfortunate necessity in the war on crime?)

As Pierre Tristam notes, the lack of feature-film-friendly images and stories covers up the extent of U.S. terrorism:

Dramatic stories of American losses or suspended tragedies spring up as out of nowhere—Jessica Lynch, the four American mercenaries killed and strung up on that Fallujah bridge, the two missing soldiers. The story plays out in the media in that Black-Hawk-Down language of inspiring honor against overwhelming odds no matter the outcome. The Iraqi background, where everything is more collectively violent, more tragic, more abject than anything the Americans are suffering collectively (remember: civilians have no armor, and civilians are bearing the brunt of the butchery), is nothing more elaborate in the storyline than those painted backdrops the old Hollywood studios used interchangeably movie after movie. Iraqis extras aren’t even in the picture, begging the indelicate cliché: when an Iraqi dies out of America ’s line of sight, has he even existed?

This is the traditional framework:

"It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism."
-- Noam Chomsky

Bacharachablog

Burt gets radical:

I've been writing love songs all my life, never rocking the boat. There were years that I paid no attention to the political process, times I never voted. *** But starting with the 2000 election, things for me began to change. I watched as Bush basically stole the election, and other terrible situations occurred; and by the time 9/11 hit, I didn't feel like writing love songs.

***

On "Who Are These People," it was very important for me to make a statement about what I was feeling at the time.

"Who are these people that keep telling us lies
and how did these people get control of our lives
and who'll stop the violence 'cause it's out of control?
make 'em stop."

And then when Elvis [Costello] came in on the middle verse he sang,

"This stupid mess we're in just keeps getting worse,
so many people dying needlessly
looks like these liars may inherit the earth
even pretending to pray and getting away with it."

Elvis sang my last two lines with the very strong intensity I felt:

"Things really have to change,
Or we're all fucked!"

Nobody has ever sung fucked like Elvis Costello.

Go Burt! Go Burt!

He's obviously not going for radio airplay with that one - especially with the new obscenity laws.

So this is what our broadcast media has come to: a Burt Bacharach song can't be heard, while we get endless doses of the psychopath known as Ann Coulter (who has yet to respond to a very generous offer from Henry Rollins).

When you can't say 'fuck,' you can't say 'fuck the government.'
-- Lenny Bruce

(thanks to A House Is Not A Homepage for the pointer)

ps - Coincidentally, I've been spinning those classic Bacharach/Warwick collaborations lately - amazing stuff.

Reflections on Experience

I really dug this Nation piece by Jackson Lears, ostensibly a review of Martin Jay's Songs of Experience, tracing the concept of "authentic experience" through the history of modern philosophy.

Cruel & Unusual, but Hilarious

The Stern Fan Network has one of the most diabolical and creative - and ultimately hilarious - pranks on its discussion board. I fell for it when I first came across this thread in the main discussion forum, a thread originating in the "Pranks" forum, which I had never checked out. But a couple of minutes (and several extra heartbeats) later, after reading similar threads, I finally figured it out - and realized this gag has been going for at least 3 years. Once you know how it works (via the [you] code) and go back to re-read the threads, you realize it's some Siriusly clever and funny stuff. Revenge of the web geeks?!