hunter88 wrote:
Grace, there's a lot of good stories in Iraq too. You just have to want to go looking for them, because you'll never see them on the evening news. The bad teenage kids make the news, the good ones are never seen. The bad Iraq stories make the news, the good ones are never seen. That's just the way it works today.
Hunter88- This is a smokescreen. Of course there's good news to be found everywhere in the world, but I can tell you from direct knowledge that the situation through almost all of Iraq is dire. Yes of course there are nice feel-good stories to be had, but the overwhelming feeling among the populace there is that things are in fact worse than when Sadam was in power. From their perspective, the basic infrastructure is completely hosed (intermitent electricity, water, sewage services, etc.) and the country is basically in a state of civil war.
Most of the acts of violence that are happening now are not traditional "terrorists" but rather it is sectarian violence among many different religious sects, clans, etc. that are fighting for power and control. This is widespread and throughout most of the country. Buying into the "al queda controls Iraq" line is buying into the same over-simplified misinformed bullshit that got us there in the first place.
-josh