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CRITICISM:Last Friday, the Houston Chronicle ran a photo on the front page of the paper with a caption that read: "The 14th anniversary of the end of the Iran-Iraq war , was a day dominated by military displays, such as this parade in Baghdad by Iraqi military women..." The photo depicted Iraqi women in traditional hajibs, women's scarves, carrying antiquated rifles, in an apparent display of female unity. On Monday, of this past week, a similarly odd picture ran on the front page of the Chronicle depicting Saddam's "cub scouts" brandishing AK-47's with a caption that read "thousands of teenage boys in Iraq swapped soccer practice for weapons training this summer...amid speculation that the United States is weighing options for war." In both instances, I wondered why would such large pictures dominate the front page of the Houston Chronicle? Were these pictures meant to invoke some sort of nostalgia for the days when I donned a scout uniform? Was I meant to see these women as a potential threat 'of mass destruction?' Analyzing the Chronicle's coverage of the situation since Monday of last week, I could only conclude that the paper's editors must be in agreement that, as Patty Reinert, Chronicle staff writer in Washington DC, points out in her August 5 article, war on Iraq is likely. Why else show Houstonians that there are people in Iraq, women and children, willing to defend their country against attack? Indeed, even articles intended to provide balance to the war drums, such as the Chronicle's August 12 Associated Press offering, titled "US lawmakers not yet ready to invade Iraq," gave the heads up to conservative pundits like Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, quoting him as saying "It is now probable that an invasion of Iraq will be necessary." [This is a time when Donald Rumsfeld is quoted widely in the press as saying "People are developing hypotheticals on hypotheticals on hypotheticals, and that is about as unuseful as anything I can imagine."] Necessary is a strong word that implies that Iraq is actually capable of offering some sort of viable threat to the United States. How viable a threat is Iraq to the United States? According to State Department consultant, the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Arms Control, in January 2002, the U.S. intelligence community predicted that the United States could face a ballistic missile threat from Iraq by the year 2015, making the threat from Iraq more distant than the ones predicted from Iran or North Korea. 2015? That's thirteen years away. Do the Chronicle editors realize that there is dissent against an attack on Iraq? Apparently not, as the only really questioning voices came in the form of editorials by Henry Kissenger and Robert D. Novak, the later a syndicated columnist based in Washington. Novak's article did provide the basis for an argument against the sort of state intervention through military means being proposed by the Bush administration. But he stopped short of saying that it is morally wrong to attack a country that, according to United Nation figures, has lost tens of thousands of children because of the economic sanctions[posed by the United States]. The real tale here: of 22 articles written on the subject of the potential war on Iraq, only 1 article by the Chronicle actually hinted at dissent. I guess the Chronicle would have me believe that Henry Kissenger represents dissent, and Iraqi women and children are errorists in training gearing up for what they feel is an inevitable conflict with the U.S. in a war that, according to groups like Amnesty International, has never ended in the 12 years that sanctions have been imposed on the Iraqi people. [How are other local papers weighing in on this situation? The simple answer to the question is that they are not. The Galveston daily news editorial staff told me that their editors are not really commenting on the potential war, choosing to concentrate on their normal local news beat instead. The only article on Iraq listed in the month of August was an article about the Iraqi soccer team playing with Italian sponsorship in southern Italy.] This is Jackson Allers for KPFT news, Houston.
[Brackets denote content that was edited out of the original broadcast because of time constraints.]
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