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.

Hit the tip bucket as well, if you can. He relies on his readers to support his work.

Why blog?

That's a question I have been asking myself for some time. Frankly, I don't know why I started this blog. I certainly did not, and do not, expect anyone to really care what I think about things. The traffic on this site is a testimony to that! LOL



I can tell some interesting stories, but have to be careful since I still sit occasionally. I plan to start doing that sort of thing shortly.



First, I want to get used to writing again. One can easily tell that I am out of practice...have not written a brief in over 30 years. Perhaps even then nobody will be interested. That's OK. It can just be fun for me and one or two of my friends.



Over the years, I have become convinced that blogs are important. Clearly, big money has forced the individual out of our politics at every level. Blogs can be the great leveller. Of course, blogs don't have editors, except for the blogoshere itself. My observation is that if someone with readerships blogs something, it is immediately fact checked by other bloggers. The same goes for the mainstream media. There are hundreds or thousands of bloggers out there that parse everything and comment upon it.



The vast number and diversity of bloggers does mean one has to be very careful at accepting what they say at face value. Care must be taken, because some will lie, misstate or misrepresent matters. The same is true of the mainstream media, unfortunately



It doesn't take too long to figure out who is honest, and who is not. If a blogger is to be read by many people, he or she must be honest and ethical. Whether one is on the Left, or the Right, or in the Center (what's that?) care should be taken to be honest and ethical or your blog will not be taken seriously except by those who do not want to be honest or ethical. There are some of those out there, of course.



The question remains: why blog? I don't know....but I will continue. For a while.