Observations

Voices From Iraq

Sean Hannity isn’t one of my favorites, but his program featuring scenes from Iraq when Secretary Rumsfeld visited there recently gives you a very different view of what is going on in Iraq from the troops’ perspective.

I’ll acknowledge the possibility that Hannity did what the mainstream media do, which is to be selective in what goes in the paper and on the air. However, even if that happened there are numerous genuine stories that paint a different picture of what is going on.

I don’t deny the bad things; how could I, given the continuous parade of visual imagery and satisfaction-laced prose that accompanies it. But I also have known intuitively for a long time, and more recently from actual anecdotal evidence such as the honest testimony of U.S. military personnel, that things aren’t as bad as the media portray them.

War is a messy proposition, even under the best of circumstances. That’s a point that so many ignore when evaluating the Iraq initiative. It is a silly juxtaposition that the Bush-haters put forth: Bush the bumbling idiot, on the one hand, and on the other, Bush the Commander-in-Chief who is expected to run a mistake-free war.

There is something critically wrong when the system that we depend upon for objective information with which to form our own individual ideas about where our country is headed takes sides in the national dialogue, instead of merely doing its job and reporting what the dialogue is. Thank goodness for Fox News, which attempts to balance the liberal media by telling us stories that rarely if ever turn up on the broadcast networks, the cable news networks and major daily newspapers.

If you are interested in knowing both sides of this story (more than you are interested in a narrow ideological agenda), I urge you to watch this program.