Usually when on vacation I am not very enthusiastic about following daily news and developments. This time it is different as one particular issue has forced me to monitor them with special interest. It is the story of American GIs being killed in Iraq on daily basis.
This is a serious matter that shouldn’t be dealt with in the simple way it is being done by the American media. It should be Washington’s No. 1 issue at a time when the US is struggling to convince more countries to join it in maintaining law and order in Iraq. In other words, the American government wants soldiers from other countries to be killed in Iraq.
Why then are the GIs being killed in the first place? Who is to benefit from their death and who is leading them into the killing fields? No one seems to have an answer to these questions. Arab satellite television stations react to news only if it is given prominence in the Western media. In the US they treat the killing of an American soldier as a routine incident, soon to be forgotten and buried in the busy American life. So what? It is just an incident like any other happening in the country. Maybe the American government is not concerned about its soldiers being killed like this as long as the reward from going to war is generous and far outweighs the loss of one soldier a day. What is most puzzling is that the American people seem to care less. All is calm on the domestic front, with no street demonstrations and protests.
I have always held the opinion that the American people do not respond to something unless their government wants them to. This contradicts their claims of a free press and an influential public opinion that can change the course of events. All these seem to exist only in myth.
We have yet to hear of the American people showing their anger over the death of their soldiers. We have yet to hear about President George Bush suffering a political embarrassment. We have yet to hear of inquiries by Congress into who is responsible for the killing of American soldiers. The American media is busy preparing itself for another war in another part of the Muslim world. In the meantime, it continues to celebrate the American victory in Iraq.
The US now faces two possibilities in Iraq; quit the country and reduce it to chaos or go for the solution it has plumbed for in Latin America by installing another Saddam Hussein under a new name.
Arab News From the Local Press 21 July 2003
