**Isn’t this a stupid thing for the US to do? [Secretly paying for Iraqi press stories] **
Only if we get caught. Oops! :eek:
Of course we can find a favorable cite. It will have been written by the U.S. drones. Which was fed to the iraqi newspapers and picked up by places like FOX news as examples of all the wonderful things we are doing in country.
Was it yesterday or the day before that Rumsfeldt was praising the honest press of Iraq?
Which novel was it where war was peace and truth was a lie?
Well at least we now know that we can treat any cite of good news that does not come direct from a reputable source, preferable a reporter on the ground, as bullshit.
Agreed.
I am surprised that people are surprised.
And it isn’t stupid…it WORKS!!..Unless you get caught.
But fewer people will read that than the good ‘news’.
In 3 years it will be forgotten and everyone will fall for the same propaganda traps again.
You could very well be right. Similar to the “big lie” technique, in time people will cite the “good things that happened last time” as justification for another such adventure and it will work. People will refuse to believe that the good news was planted, “after all some of it must have been true.”
There isn’t exactly a strong tradition of independant reporting in Iraq. Heck, there isn’t any tradition of independant reporting in Iraq. Just being factually correct is a huge step up.
There are problems; many of them (you don’t rebuild an economy ruined over 20 years in 2. It’s certainly not up to U.S. standards. But things are getting better. Even small things, like new cars and cellphones, are becoming common. Electricity is coming back online. In most areas, attacks are rare (being confined mostly to one corridor of Iraq).
A variety of sources confirms that progress is being made.
http://usinfo.state.gov/mena/Archive/2004/Nov/29-55405.html
http://www.iraqfoundation.org/reports/pol/2005/sr138.pdf
And the legislature is certainly working on the problem.
http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2005/hrg050720a.html
Off the top of my head, the power systems are back up and running to prewar levels and are being expanded, oil production is rising (though crude prices aren’t as high as they were this summer), the government is getting many new applications for construction licenses, and they’re refilling some of the old marshes which Saddam drained in a hissy fit. That’s no small feat.
No, the real problem in Iraq is not economic, or even the foreign guerrillas and terrorists, but that it isn’t a nation in the sense we might think of. The Iraqis may choose to stay together, but there’s a lot of bad blood (and the Sunnis even now are often willfully ignorant about the fact they profited personally from stomping on the rest of Iraq).
I think you might be putting too much on Hussein. He wasted a lot of his country’s resources on pointless wars, but otherwise, I get the impression (no cite) that Iraq, at the time of the first Gulf War, was a richer country than it had been when Hussein came to power.
Not only that but – I think a Doper in an Iraq-related thread provided a cite on this – the Sunnis are willfully ignorant about the fact that they constitute a numerical minority in the country. They think they’re the majority. Thus, any electoral result that does not put them in control seems a perversion of reality, to them.
And my point was that the US is paying for the planting of good news. The poor security in Iraq means that journalists aren’t really free to thoroughly investigate claims about how things are there. So how do we know that these cites aren’t ultimately derived from faulty sources?
But things are pretty OK in most of the country. Shi’a and Kurd territory is pretty peaceful, and that comprises most of the country. Sunni territory, including Bagdad, is the problem. I will hapily agree that it has had little economic success.
I do agree it was potentially foolish, but not that it was unusual or particularly stupid. It is, if anything, simply an old tactic that has been rendered less adequate given modern information dominance. But promoting somewhat biased articles is not something I’m going to get freaky over.