Media and the Iraq War

The Iraq War has been going on for about five years now. In a blog called Healing Iraq (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/) , people are voicing their opinions about what’s really going on in the war torn country and how the media portrays it. One entry that really shocked me was about Iraqis who escaped Iraq. In an entry called Rot Here or Die There, the refugees that were able to escape to Lebanon were being imprisoned. Iraqi refugees are not even seen as temporary citizens, which subjects them to being put in jail.

In a testimonial, one refugee said “if I can’t regularize my status, I will go back to Iraq. If I go back to Iraq, I will be killed. I don’t want to go back, but it is better for me to go back than to spend one more day being locked up with criminals.”

The refugees don’t have much of a choice. It’s either go to jail with criminals or go back home and die. Other escapees are paying 10-15 thousand dollars to be trafficked to Sweden.

I find it amazing how people in the United States don’t usually hear about stories like these. The media here in the states doesn’t really tell these kinds of stories, and if they do, they’re not given that much air time. In one of the entries by Zeyad, he “thought the American line all along was that improvement in security, if it can be called so, would signal the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq, not extend it to years with plans for permanent bases and "investment" opportunities. Right?” I’ve heard people say things like this before, but they don’t say it to everybody. Only because no one can really prove that money was the major reason for going into to Iraq in the first place. Just ask Rosie O’Donnell. She said something along the lines of the president only went into Iraq for oil. Even if there was some validity to her point, she had no proof, and people jumped all over her for that. The American people have come to realize that the war in Iraq was a big mistake and that the U.S. should not be over there.

Zeyad also wrote that the average American probably thinks that no news is good news, meaning if nothing is reported on Iraq, then all must be going well. This is very typically of the American media when it reports on international events. More often than not, stories from Iraq often portray the positives way more then the negatives, even if the negatives drastically outweigh the positives.