We all know why the MSM has let Iraq fall off the pages….because the place provides no news. Peace has come to that country and peace provides no blaring headlines of blame on Bush and company. But a few pieces sneak in and today Dexter Filkins writes in the New York Times that the country he knew in 2006 is now vastly different:
BAGHDAD — At first, I didn’t recognize the place.
On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.
Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.
Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.
These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.
When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope.
Being a NYT’s writer he just has to add the caveat that this could, just might, be a fleeting scene of peace because it all could fall to hell in a handbasket. He also has to print complete falsehoods like this one:
The Awakening, a poetic name for paying former Sunni insurgents not to kill Americans or Iraqis
Well, guess we can’t expect the liberal MSM to just fall over and capitulate in defeat…but this will do.
Of course if we listen to the health and science editors at Reuters we would think the only reason Iraq is now peaceful is because of ethnic cleansing. Yes, the health and science editors.
Anyways, just think, if the country had listened to Obama and the Democrats two years ago the place WOULD be a vastly different place then it is today. It would have been another killing fields.
But thankfully Bush was in the White House, and he listened to the Generals and people like McCain who said a new strategy TO WIN must be put in place. And now we get article like this one.
Time to admit you were wrong Obama?
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