Iraq: What we don't hear

One thing I have noticed since we invaded Iraq was that There are two stories out there: one, the bad news as reported by the Mainstream Media; and two: the good news, which one can only find in small media, and on the Internet. There is a lot of very good reporting going on by independents who are embedded with our troops, and who are getting the news from observation, rather than using "stringers" of dubious loyalty like the MSM does.

Micheal Totten is one who has just embedded with the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad, and he has posted about his first patrol with them. They are in an area that has already seen the results of the surge. In the Wake of the Surge describes the patrol.

"...Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny.
Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment.
I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in
Baghdad.

It was an edgy “Kurdistan,” though. Every now and then someone drove down
the street in a vehicle. If any military-aged males (MAMs as the Army guys call
them) were in the car, the soldiers stopped it and made everybody get out. The
vehicle and the men were then searched.

Everyone who was searched took it in stride. Some of the Iraqi men smirked
slightly, as if the whole thing were a minor joke and a non-threatening routine
annoyance that they had been through before. The procedure looked and felt more
like airport security in the United States than, say, the more severe Israeli
checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza....."

You won't hear anything like this from the MSM, to whom only "blood and guts" and bad news is really "news."

It is still not peaceful yet. Terror does still come to the residents of Baghdad. Sadr City has still not been cleared and that is a real cesspool. Residents are still afraid.

"....There are terrible stories around here about the masked men of the death
squads. Sometimes they break into people’s houses and asking the children who
they’re afraid of. If they name the enemies of the death squad, they are spared.
If they name the death squad itself, they and their families are killed. It’s a
wicked interrogation because it cannot be beaten – the children don’t know which
death squad has broken into the house...."

What will happen to these people if the US precipitously abandons them as some wish us to do? One should not have to ask.

Read the whole post. It has great pictures as well.

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