WHY DO THEY HATE US?

As I've suggested before, perhaps its because "they" read the newspapers at home.

Take the story of the alleged wedding party we allegedly fired upon. I haven't posted on this yet because I don't like blogging something I don't feel I'm in control of, and I just haven't had a chance to read enough of what's available on this. But you don't need to have read or listened a great deal to know the key fact -- the US is disputing the basic claim that this was a wedding, and not something more sinister. As Jason van Steenwyk notes, the San Fransico Chronicle's headline is bad (a problem even if it's corrected in the article, by the way) but the Toronto Star he cites piece is amazing.

Just look at that headline: "`They didn't even spare one child'"

My feeling is there's always trouble when these article start with first person narratives. That's just a technique designed to do nothing more than rouse emotions -- against us.

As survivors tell it, the wedding party was in full swing. The band was playing tribal music and the guests had just finished eating dinner when, at about 9 p.m., they heard the roar of U.S. warplanes.

Fearing trouble, the revellers ended the festivities and went to bed. About six hours later, the first bomb struck.

"Mothers died with their children in their arms," said Madhi Nawaf, who survived the attack Wednesday in Makr al-Deeb on the Syrian border. Up to 45 people died, mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe.

"One of them was my daughter," Nawaf said. "I found her a few steps from the house, her two-year-old son Raad in her arms. Her one-year-old son, Raed, was lying nearby, missing his head."

The reporter then turns to the US side:

In Baghdad, Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of operations, said yesterday the U.S. military would investigate after Iraqi officials reported the survivors' story. But he said the military maintained the target was a safe house for infiltrators slipping across the border to fight coalition soldiers in Iraq.

Kimmitt cited as evidence that several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site. Soldiers had also found jewellery and vehicles that indicated the people were not wandering Bedouin but "town dwellers."

Putting the fact that there will be an investigation first is a way of casting doubt on everything else the military says (yeah sure -- they don't even believe it. If they do, why the need for an investigation?) Then they select from the adjectives Kimmitt used the phrase "town dwellers," to leave the implicit argument clear: the US has now taken it upon themselves to think they have the right to kill you if you're a "town dweller" in the wrong place. Which is clearly not what Kimmitt meant at all.

They then include one of Gen. Mattis' more, uh, Marine like sentences:

"Ten miles from the Syrian border and 80 miles from the nearest city and a wedding party?" marine Maj.-Gen. James Mattis told reporters in Falluja. "How many people go to the middle of the desert to have a wedding party?

"Plus, they had 30 males of military age with them. Let's not be naïve ... Bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."

I don't know what the entire statement was. But when that's what's cut, it reads as if we're saying we don't need to apologize at all for anything we do, not we don't have to apologize because we were right.

But get this: "But members of the Bou Fahad tribe say they consider the border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire. However, survivors insisted no weapons were fired Wednesday, despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack." Well, if they say they didn't even fire in celebration (since the beginning of the article, remember, says they were in bed, why bring it up at all?)

I like this:

The U.S. military suspects militants cross the Makr al-Deeb area from Syria to fight the Americans, but all the Iraqi men interviewed insisted there were no foreign fighters there.

Because if they were smuggling foreign fighters, they surely would have been up front about that, right?

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

> Mothers died with their children in their arms.

Gosh, when was it - it must have been around 1985, when for some reason there was a spate of children dying in mothers' arms stories. It wasn't overwhelming like the Summer of Shark Attack Death but they started turning up enough so that I mentioned it to a linguist friend. She regognized the category immediately: ``Arm death.''

There's no sense of over-the-top anymore. Oscar Wilde : A man would need a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

[gordon Daugherty]

This is abt a different engagement but serves to show what Americans are faced with when they get into action; note especially the parts abt women and children:
www.intellectualconservative.com/article3444.html

[John McDonnell]

You might take a look at the 5/22 NY times article by Ian Fisher. The times uncritially reports the following two sentences as valid witness testimony. The statements are patently absurd, and contradicted by other statements in the article. The Times, like the Wash Post, prides itself as "setting the agenda." The agenda is clearly to print anything, any ridiculous lie uttered by an Iraqi, that will damage the U.S. Although one might be uncertain, based on the reports, whether the site was a "rat line" way station, or a wedding 80 miles from town, there can be no doubt that the claims of soldiers walking throught the wreckage at down killing the wounded, is a lie.

From NY times 5/22: located at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/international/middleeast/22IRAQ.html
"Witnesses said that guests scattered and several were shot as they ran. Mr. Jabbar said that American troops went through the wreckage at dawn and killed several of the wounded."