I have mixed feelings looking at the peace marches to stop the war in Iraq. I am eager to stop all wars; in fact I spent many years working against the Reagan Administration’s escalation of the armed race. I understand the peace marchers, I was one. It is very hard for all of us to read about the many innocent Iraqis being murdered daily, and so many of our own soldiers are dying also in this war. We feel guilty about the killing and want peace. However, no national policy should be conducted on the basis of current feelings, as noble as the desire for peace is. Our national actions must be based on the full reality, and long term aspects of the situation.

What is the situation now?
Today, these peace loving people want the US and England to leave Iraq now and stop the killing there. I am eager for it also. Can it be done now?

Sadly their desire for peace does not allow them to grasp the reality of the Arab world. The killings in Iraq are done mostly by one Muslim group against another, Shiite and Sunnis are murdering one another, resulting in innocent civilians being murdered by the hundreds every week. These Muslim extremists have even resorted lately to blowing trucks with Chlorine gas to spread the fear, the terror. But these are not only a limited number of Muslim extremists; the Mehdi army, is one of the main murderers of civilian, lead by Muqtada Al-Sadr, a religious “firebrand” as the media calls him. He commands many thousands of Shiite terrorists.

The peace marchers are against US “aggression” in Iraq. However, we are doing all we can, sacrificing our soldiers and spending immense amounts of money, to reduce Iraqi casualties. The anger of many marchers is directed at us, not against the Sunnis and Shiite leaders who direct their youth to kill one another. Similarly in Israel, the Palestinians got freedom to create their own government in Gaza and instead have been murdering one another and shooting rockets into Israel. But rarely any media expresses anger at the Palestinians’ disregard for human life.

Why is there anger against the US? Is it because President Bush opened a Pandora box of sectarian killing no one would expected? No one anticipated the gruesome atrocities committed daily in Iraq. I certainly did not expect such mass atrocities and I have some reasonable knowledge of the massacres Muslims have committed against their own, and others, for untold decades, if not centuries. Because of our Western way of life, it is hard, very hard for us; me included, to grasp the utter lack of care for human life by Muslim terrorists. We should direct our anger at the source of the killings: at the terrorists and their leaders.

It matters little now if the Bush administration misled us, by mistake or by design, to believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The past is over; we must deal with the current reality not what might have happened. This is one of the first things they thought us in business school: the past is now over, how would you solve the problem as it is now before you? Blaming may feel good but accomplish nothing. Maybe it gives political benefits to the Democrats, but that is not in our national interest now.

We all want to reduce the murders, but if the US leaves Iraq soon, will it be better? Will the Sunni- Shiite struggle for power and a bigger share of the oil wealth disappear with our departing troops?
Obviously not. The killing would escalate and we would be blamed again for leaving and opening this new Pandora’s Box. Some say we should have left Saddam in power, let him plan another regional war, let him cause the killing of a million more of his own people and Iranian again.

Some believe that we should have attacked Iran first, not Iraq, however, very few grasped earlier Iran’s intensive nuclear weapon development, and its desire for regional domination and destroying Israel. If we did we should have stopped them first by any means appropriate. What can we do now is the question, not what might have been.
If we leave Iraq soon it would not be easy for us to attack Iran; every one will accuse us again of meddling in the internal affairs of another Muslim country - Iran.

There is no clean solution to the internal Iraqi power struggle. They have to solve it, if they can. We should continue to rebuild the Iraqi military and police so they can control and quiet their own country. When they can do it to a reasonable extent, we could leave.

The peace marches were few and small, but still I am concerned that increased pressure by Europeans and American peace loving people on the US to withdraw soon from Iraq would escalate the killing there.
The murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq are being used for both internal and external purposes, in revenge, power, and to influence the global media and the world.

Is that what the peace marches want, escalation of murders?

I don’t think so.

Matania
3/07

So many complained that Israel did not tell its story during the Lebanon war. Israel could not do it well because of its belief in a free press. It allowed almost any one to go anywhere and to see anything they wanted. Dictatorship and terrorists do not suffer from this problem, they select and manipulate the information. This is especially important because the global media cooperated with Hizbollha and some of the media is anti Israeli to start with. This media was eager to display anti Israeli stories and pictures without checking their validity.
Read the summary below to grasp better this critical issue that affected the war itself.

Matania

The Price of a Free Press - Anshel Pfeffer (Jerusalem Post)

An important study on last summer's war has just been published by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. It is the first to give a comprehensive explanation of how, in an asymmetrical war "between a state [Israel] and a militant, secretive, religiously fundamentalist sect or faction [Hizbullah]," the fight is just as much about information and image as it is about military gains.
(http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/research_papers/R29.pdf),

"The Israeli-Hizbullah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict" by veteran reporter, author and broadcaster Marvin Kalb is a must-read for journalists, the military, politicians, spokesmen and news consumers.

Kalb writes that democratic societies living by the ideals of a free and unfettered press will always be at a disadvantage to dictatorships and oppressive ideologies, adept at manipulating the media. "A closed society conveys the impression of order and discipline; an open society, buffeted by the crosswinds of reality and rumor, criticism and revelation, conveys the impression of disorder, chaos and uncertainty."

* Israel's campaign was remarkably transparent. Even openly hostile Arab TV networks, such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, were allowed to operate in almost total freedom and film IDF units preparing for battle. Every failure and mishap on the battlefield - and relative chaos on the home front - was highlighted.

* On the other side, Hizbullah controlled the journalists covering Lebanon with an iron fist. Media tours of Hizbullah-controlled areas were tightly managed, with foreign reporters sternly warned against wandering off and talking to local residents unsupervised.

* Hizbullah also forbade any photographs of its fighters. Cameramen were warned never to show men with guns or ammunition. The only armed personnel seen during this war were IDF soldiers; Hizbullah remained throughout a phantom army.

* Another scene almost never shown was the hundreds of Hizbullah firing positions and missile launch sites within residential areas and private homes, the cause of many civilian deaths and a violation of international law.

* Footage coming out of Lebanon dealt almost exclusively with the results of the IDF bombing. Few news organizations made an effort to balance these pictures with those of the damage from Hizbullah's indiscriminate bombing of Israeli civilians.

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