[Peace-discuss] Bad craziness

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I'm listening to US propagandist Dan Senor on TV explain Bush's speech
tonight.  They keep jumping from him to various reporters -- I admit they
too look like propagandists -- and I'm reminded of what one of the best
reporters in SW Asia (British) said about Senor and the "colleague" whom
he just mentioned. --CGE]

...American civil and military leaders in Iraq live in a strange fantasy
world. It is on display every day in a cavernous hall in the old Islamic
Conference Centre in Baghdad, where Coalition spokesmen hold daily press
conferences. The civil side is represented by Dan Senor of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, a bony-faced, dark-suited man, recently imported
from the White House press office. He makes little secret of the fact that
his job is to present a picture of Iraq that will get President Bush
re-elected. He jogs around the heavily protected US enclave, known as the
Green Zone, wearing a T-shirt with 'Bush and Cheney in 2004' written on
it. Senor isn't impressed by the Iraqi resistance: for him it will never
amount to anything much more than a small gang of al-Qaida terrorists and
die-hard Saddamists, desperately and vainly seeking to prevent the birth
of a new Iraq.

Much zanier is Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the Deputy Director for
Coalition Operations, who specialises in steely-eyed determination. He
likes to illustrate his answers with homilies drawn from the home life of
the Kimmitt family. One day an Iraqi journalist complained that US
helicopters were scaring children in Baghdad by roaring low and fast over
the rooftops. Kimmitt replied that he had spent most of his adult life
'either on or near military bases, married to a woman who teaches in the
schools', and that on these bases 'you often hear the sound of tanks
firing. You often hear the sound of artillery rounds going off.' Yet Mrs
Kimmitt, the general continued proudly, had been able to keep her pupils
calm despite the constant thundering of the guns by 'letting them
understand that those booms and those bangs were simply the sounds of
freedom'...

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