P-I Fantasizes about Iraq

The article started on the bottom right-hand corner of page one and continued back to page A12 of the May 17th Post-Intelligencer. The by-line didn't show a person's name, instead it read "P-I News Services." It was entitled "Flow of civilian goods into Iraq may be restored" and it was one of the worst pieces of biased reporting I've read in a long time.

Usually international news articles that have the P-I staff byline are based on Associated Press wire service articles, The New York Times, and other sources, with a few pieces of information written by P-I staffers. It gives the P-I staff a chance to change the spin of an article, to make clarifications, add historical information, etc. In this case, instead of being more informative, the article came out much worse than the articles that appeared in other sources on that day. Here's why:

The first three paragraphs on page one outline a new plan by the U.S. and Britain to lift sanctions against Iraq for certain commercial goods, while tightening controls on weapons-related goods. Then the article begins outlining the history of the sanctions in a very biased way.

The article explains that the sanctions are killing upwards of 5,000 children each month, but doesn't mention that the accumulated death toll of all Iraqis of all ages is well past the 1 million number and growing. This puts the US and Britain, the main enforcers of the sanctions, in the same league as the hated Khmer Rouge.

In addition, the article ignores the fact that the US and Britain stand virtually alone in their demand to continue the sanctions: "That suffering has proved a powerful propaganda tool for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who has long campaigned for the UN controls to be lifted." No mention of France, Germany, Russia, China, virtually all of the Third World, and the hundreds of thousands of people here in the US who think the sanctions are an atrocity and have been working to end them. Saddam Hussein is the evil mastermind behind it all. Give us a break; we're not that stupid (even if the P-I staffperson who wrote that paragraph is).

The evil Iraqi mastermind reappears on page A12: "Iraq demands that sanctions be lifted and has accused the United States and Britain of perpetuating the suffering of Iraqi civilians through the embargoes, a claim that has received sympathy elsewhere. In the past year, Iraq has successfully eroded sanctions. It has resumed diplomatic ties with many countries, persuaded more than a dozen countries to start commercial flights to Baghdad, reopened a long-closed oil pipeline to Syria and illegally imposed a surcharge on its oil customers."

Note the emphasis on what Iraq has done. Forget that other nations have heads of state who have their own interests (and consciences) that have traveled to Iraq, denounced the sanctions, and made the decision to resume trade with Iraq. Forget also that the main impetus behind the US and Britain's move to relax commercial sanctions is to open the Iraqi market to western businesses. Also forget that Iraqi oil goes into US gas tanks to help fuel our summer vacation driving season. That's why we don't like it when Iraq charges a little more for its oil.

There's also no mention of Scott Ritter, former head of the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq, who resigned in protest of the whole charade and now frequently speaks publicly about the fact that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. There's no mention of Denis Halliday, the other former UN official who resigned from monitoring the oil for food program and now speaks out against the sanctions.

Furthermore, the article doesn't mention that Iraq immediately denounced the new proposal by the US and Britain as not going far enough to dismantle the sanctions. In addition, other nations around the world have scoffed and called the new proposal a joke, saying that the US considers many more items to be defense-related than are reasonably so. Instead the article offers: "It was not clear how Iraq--much less its immediate neighbors--would react to the new approach."

In addition, the article does its best to hide the US support of the plan, leaving us to believe that it's mostly a British proposal. Not until the last three paragraphs of the article do we find information that tells us that the US does support this plan.

Finally, the article--as with most US articles on the topic, including the AP's and the Washington Post's--emphasizes that this move is a way to ease the sanctions. In fact, the US and Britain drew up the proposal as a way to tighten the sanctions. It would put every commercial flight into Baghdad under the oversight of the UN; that's not currently the case. This plan is an effort at damage control--a last stand to prevent the sanctions from completely collapsing because of non-compliance. You'll find nothing of this reality in the P-I's version of events.