http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/44771/Ten Fallacies About the Violence in Iraq
The escalating violence in Iraq's civil war is now earning considerable attention as we pass yet another milestone
-- U.S. occupation there, in two weeks, will exceed the length of the Second World War for America. While the
news media have finally started to grapple with the colossal amount of killing, a number of misunderstandings
persist. Some are willful deceptions. Let's look at a few of them:
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2. The killers do it to influence U.S. politics. This was the mantra of right-wing bloggers and cable blowhards like
Bill O'Reilly, who asserted time and again before November 7 that the violence was a "Tet offensive" designed to
tarnish Bush and convince Americans to vote for Democrats. This is American solipsism, at which the right wing
excels. If anything, the violence has grown since November 7.
English-language sources have more than 1,000 dead since the Bush rejection at the polls. Bill, are the Iraqi fighters
now aiming at the Iowa caucuses in '08?
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10. Trust the same people who caused or endorsed the war to tell us what to do next. We know who they are:
Bush, Cheney, McCain, and other cronies; the neo-cons now increasingly on the periphery of power but still
bleating (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Adelman, Lieberman), the liberal hawks, and the right-wing media (Krauthamer,
Fox News, Glenn Beck, phalangist bloggers, et al). They say, "just finish the job." Just finish the job... at a human
cost of how many more dead? How many lives ruined? How much more damage to U.S.-Arab relations? How much
anti-Muslim racism fomented to justify the killing?