This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.
I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.
U.S. Imperial Ambitions Thwart Iraqis’ Peace Plans
by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar
AlterNet
May 21, 2007.
Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.
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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.
That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.
Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.
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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.
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As early as 2005,
the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.
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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.
