Category Archives: Iraq

HUMPHRYS IN BASRA.

By | |
47 Comments

I see that the BBC have flown the intrepid John Humphrys over to Basra (Never mind those pesky carbon emissions, eh?) to report on the current situation there. I caught his first report this morning interviewing a senior army officer who in true blue military form showed a tenacity to finish the job by getting the Iraqi army up to speed. Humphrys zeroed in on those British soldiers who had lost their lives during the past few years in Basra wondering if their sacrifice had been in vain. How delightful for the next of kin. Why does the BBC have such a defeatist and pessimistic mindset? I always find that BBC interviews with Armed Forces personnel demonstrate the best and worst of British – with our military showing courage and vision whilst the BBC shows unrelenting gloom and doom. The beat of surrender is always close to the surface…

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

MORE OIL FOR BLOOD.

By | | ,
55 Comments

The news that Iraq plans to significantly increase it’s oil production in the next year or so is being hailed by the BBC this evening as conclusive evidence that THIS is what motivated the US invasion. If only! The BBC are real truthers on this – incapable or unwilling of understanding that removing the Saddamite thugocracy was virtuous in itself! It is such an insult to all those brave servicemen and women – US and UK – who have made the ultimate sacrifice trying to give Iraqis a shot at democracy to put it all down to a lust for cheap oil. But since when did the BBC care about our military….

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

TERROR FILES AT THE BBC.

By | | ,
66 Comments

Am I the only person surprised at the fact that when top secret files concerning Al Queda and Iraq are accidentally left on the London tube they are found by an ordinary member of the public and then handed over…to the BBC? Given the BBC’s opposition to the war in Iraq and its inability to understand that Al Queda is a terrorist group, I find it odd that such an organisation is handed such sensitive files. Would the London police not have been the obvious destination? I note that BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, immediately starts leaking the content, as we would expect. There is only one thing in the world worse than losing top secret security file and that is the BBC finding them!

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

All the bad news…

By | | ,
10 Comments

I don’t know whether the BBC will devote a report to the fact that May has been among the least violent of the Iraq war- it could be confirmed as the producing the lowest US casualty figures depending on events today and tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll register that the six month figure for that is the lowest for any period since the fighting began in 2003 source. Iraq could be arriving at peace.

What I do know is that the BBC will report this against the backdrop of bad news, pre-announced bad news– covered in some depth. Somehow the BBC’s attitude for statistics tends only to work in selected directions.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

AMERICAN GANGSTER CRIME.

By | | ,
104 Comments

I just love the screaming BBC headline “US SNIPER SHOT AT KORAN” An American sniper has been sent home from Iraq for ….using a copy of the Koran for target practice at a shooting range near Baghdad. The Muslim “holy book” (DV italics) was found riddled with bullet holes last week by Iraqi police, who also discovered offensive graffiti inside its cover. My god – as if Abu Ghraib wasn’t bad enough now those pesky Yanks go shooting a copy of the Koran. Time for a Presidential apology and a public enquiry? At a time when too many Islamists use the Koran as their essential manual to justify mass murder without the mildest censure from Al-beeb, I would have thought that this was one of the mildest possible incidents that could occur in any war. However the BBC is so steeped in anti-Americanism that any sort of incident like this is used to demonise the US military further.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Bushwhacked.

By | | ,
46 Comments

Sometimes I read a report and wonder why it is there. Nothing existential, just the non-sensical logic behind it. This morning the BBC headline runs ” Bush ‘is avoiding Iraq decisions'”- top billing for this story.

Let’s leave alone the fact that this headline immediately promotes a subjective, politicised point. Let’s question its very newsworthiness. Why is it there? Perhaps, I thought, because yesterday Bush was hailing Iraq progress and (as the BBC put it) freezing any “pull out” from Iraq. That’s newsworthy, really.

Yet what about today’s headline? Ah, well that’s the Democrat response. We’ve moved from reporting a decision arising from concrete events to the political strategy of one US party. Not cricket, BBC.

You can often tell the BBC position because they reiterate a certain rhetorical line in an article, underlining a particular soundbyte.

In this case, we first of all get the warm-up line from the Beeb, “But his opponents say the people want answers from this president, now.” (which certainly has a rhetorical ring to it inappropriate to a factual news item), and then the main event from Nancy Pelosi:


“”The president has taken us into a failed war, he’s taken us deeply into debt and that debt is taking us into recession,” she said. “We need some answers from the president.””

It’s like the run-up before the penalty kick.

What’s really funny though is the fact that the BBC headlines a story Bush “avoiding Iraq decisions”, when in fact he has just decided something- which was yesterday’s news. Today’s news is that he’s declined to follow-through with a decision that the Democrats wanted and want to intensify and speed up. This is rather more nuanced and requires the BBC’s special news skills (arising from its unique funding) to bring to our attention.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

WHICH SIDE TO BELIEVE.

By | | , ,
108 Comments

I was interested in this BBC article covering what it claims to be “Rival claims over Basra Battle” The content of the story strikes me as being hypercritical of the claims made by the democratically elected Maliki government and its progress in Basra, whilst simultaneously accepting the words of Shi’ite tyrant Moqtada Sadr and his Mehdi terrorist army. The “fierce” resistance of these thugs is singled out for praise with further tributes to them “fighting to a standstill” the lawful Iraqi military. Can’t the BBC ever do a report from Iraq which actually praises the progress being made, no matter how imperfect? I think the answer is NO because in the BBC narrative, understood by all reporters, this was an “illegal” invasion by the Great Satan after precious Iraqi oil. The rest is all detail. Through this perverse prism, there can be no real progress – it’s all a quagmire. The BBC admiration for the likes of Al Sadr is sickening. Can you imagine what these latter day BBC types would have filed had they been around in WW2 – I’m betting we would have been reading about the fierce courage of the Nazis and the heroic resistance of the Japanese.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

THOSE CRAZY AMERICANS.

By | |
22 Comments

The BBC’s crusade against the war in Iraq and its obsession with impugning the reputation of the US Armed forces never ceases with the latest headline informing us that six people have been killed in a US air strike near the Iraqi town of Samarra, with some reports suggesting they were US-allied anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters. The US denied these claims which the BBC says comes from a police source and a militia member.

Mmm..a police source and a “militia” member? Well given that the BBC itself never ceases telling us how heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police has been by terrorists (that nasty word again) and given that the terrorists (“Militia” in BBC-speak) themselves are perhaps not the ideal source for comment on the US military – what credibility has this accusation? None, but that is neither here nor there, it’s the impression that counts. The BBC then goes on to quote some doom-mongering from the Iraq Body Count organisation, I suggest you visit their web site and decide for yourself just how unbiased they are!

The BBC is doing its very best to play down the progress made by the valiant US armed forced in Iraq and at the same time pump up the volume of the allegations made by the Jihadi.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

5 YEARS ON.

By | |
94 Comments

Well, today is the day – the 5th anniversary of the liberation of Iraq and I have been watching and listening to the BBC coverage, have you?

Last evening’s “Newsnight” was a special devoted to the Iraq situation five years on and a more one-sided programme one could hardly conceive. I believe that the BBC aligned itself from the start with the anti-war pro-Saddam rabble and not a lot has changed since. The Newsnight mood music and the tone of the voice-overs was sombre, and even the charts that showed JUST how successful the Surge has been were caveated to ensure that no good news was let out untainted.

There was an interview with Jonathan Powell, the man who is so steeped in appeasement care of his work with the murderous IRA that he thinks we should be talking to Al Qaeda, Hamas et al. Then there was a panel of experts in the studio weighted 3:1 against the liberation, sorry, I meant occupation. (Always best to get the terminology right) There was Charles Kennedy, the uber liberal who wants troops taken out right now , no matter what the Iraqis think. Kennedy got away with blue murder making all kinds of claims suggesting that he was on the high moral ground when in fact he lies in the moral sewer. Then there was a former assistant to the first Iraqi PM who had nothing good to say about the US liberation. He was also a dissembler of the truth, lying through his teeth when he claimed AQ had no presence in Iraq prior to the war. Then there was a “wise old cove” from our diplomatic service, who had been based in Basra, whose insights extended to a complaint that there was no post-victory plan in place and it was all chaos. I wonder which wars he could point to that were on an orderly and bureaucratic basis?

Finally, the only voice in favour of what has been done was Richard Perle. With 3 voices against his, the BBC stacked this to ensure that the anti-war “all is doom and gloom” message got across loud and clear. Was there NO UK commentator that Newsnight could find to both defend the liberation and indeed warmly applaud what has been done by our armed forces?

I laughed when the anti-war panel all agreed that “everyone” knew that victory over Saddam would be quick. Total rubbish. At the time, we were regaled by the BBC over the prowess of the elite Iraqi Revolutionary Guard, and how they would constitute a formidable opposition. Remember? As we know, they scarpered when faced with the US armed forces.

It struck me that this was NOT a debate on the war in Iraq five years on, this was a debate on how the war had all gone wrong. This was a typical pre-determined BBC set-up, and I felt sorry for Richard Perle. Paxman is idolised by some as the tough talking no-nonsense journalist but he let Kennedy and co get away with some outrageous claims.

Questions he might have asked could have included;

  • Is it morally right to allow genocidal butchers like Saddam to stay in situ rather than risk military action?
  • What was Churchill’s post-war plan?
  • With Al Queda declaring Iraq the front-line in its war with us, what message would a sudden withdrawal send?
  • With US troops still in Germany and Japan 60+ years later, does that make these wars a failure? What about the failure of the EU and UN to rally behind this liberation?
  • Apart from the Ba’athists, who obviously enjoyed patronage from Saddam and have been resentful ever since, how do the rest of the Iraqi people feel five years on?

There IS a real debate to be had here but the BBC is not facilitating it. How about balancing the panel so we can have it? How about starting from the point that Saddam headed up a degenerate tyranny that funded terrorism and propagated genocide. Five years on, we have one less monster in power, an Iraq that is showing signs of improvement, and whilst it may not be a fully functioning Jeffersonian democracy, it is way better than what is was.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

THE WAR ON THE WAR IN IRAQ.

By | | , ,
65 Comments

We all know how vociferously the BBC has opposed the US-led liberation of Iraq. We all know how good news is no news when it comes to Iraq but bad news is of course always welcome. So no big surprise to see the BBC giving all due prominence to the latest Red Cross/Red Crescent report on Iraq under the doom-laden headline “Bleak picture of Iraq conditions.” We get the usual left wing mantra about how Iraq’s humanitarian situation is “among the most critical in the world”. (What, worse than those poor Gazans? Really?) However the BBC and the Red Cross/Red Crescent are not so keen to tell us that..

-Emergency campaigns have supported the immunization of 98 percent of children 1-3 years (3.62 million children) against measles, mumps, and rubella. As a result, there has been a 90 percent reduction in laboratory confirmed cases of measles of children under five (4.56 million) immunized against polio during the 2004-05 national polio immunization campaign, enabling Iraq to maintain its polio-free status. –
-Vaccinated 3.2 million children under five and 700,000 pregnant women, with UNICEF and WHO.
-Provided supplementary doses of vitamin A for more than 1.5 million nursing mothers and 600,000 children under two, and iron folate supplements for over 1.6 million women of childbearing age.
-Trained 11,400 staff at over 2,000 community child care units to screen for malnutrition and to provide monthly rations of high protein biscuits to malnourished children and pregnant mothers.
-Renovated 110 facilities and equipped 600 centers with basic clinical and lab equipment.
-Trained over 2,500 primary health care workers, improving access to essential primary health care.

That’s JUST in the health-care area. The reality is that the BBC driven narrative does not allow for any substantive progress. The war was “illegal” apparently, we were all “conned” into going along with it, and so the Red Cross/Red Crescent report is grist to the mill. There are many sides to the Iraq situation but the BBC is only interested in the “It’s a quagmire get us out of there” angle, which it assiduously pumps out.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.