American Views Abroad

 
The Great Disconnect now taking place is a country untouched by the rages and wrath of war alone decides --- mainly for political reasons, even worse for a President's legacy --- whether to stay the course or get out, while far too little attention is being paid to those who are suffering daily. There are exceptions. The LA Times leads today with Mideast Shaking Its Head.

'....to many on the ground in the Mideast, (Bush's) speech spoke volumes of a gaping disconnect between high-flown US promises and a deadly, turbulent reality. ....Rather than sowing political progress the US presence in Iraq has poisoned the mood so thoroughly that secular and moderate activists now stay silent for fear of being tarred as American agents.

...... If the US really wanted to boost stability, many Arabs say, the Bush administration would aggressively seek a cure for the regional sore spot of Israeli-Palestinian violence.'
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-neighbors12jan12,0,6744781.story?coll=la-home-headlines

What About the Iraqis? by Christian Caryl in The New York Review of Books provides good insight into Baghdad Burning, the online diary of a young Baghdad woman who uses the pen name Riverbend as well as discussing books on Iraq by two US journalists who actually speak Arabic.

'Americans, by now, can be forgiven for believing that we know something about the situation in Iraq; we hear about it, after all, every day, in what seems like benumbing detail. And yet, in reality, what we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict. The language of foreign policy abstraction and a misplaced sense of decorum on the part of the press and television also conspire to sanitize the fantastically disgusting realities of everyday death.

.....Considerable attention has been paid within the United States to the Bush administration's failure, before the invasion, to understand the true state of Saddam's programs for the development of weapons of mass destruction. Yet there has been far less in-depth analysis of the government's equally scandalous inability to form a clear picture of Iraqi public opinion, and its reluctance to study the history and culture of the country where it was about to embark on the most ambitious nation-building experiment since World War II.'
www.nybooks.com/articles/19793
- posted by Gloria @ 4:43 PM