bearer of bad tidings

i know that i have been a posting fiend lately. hope everyone keeps up! :) please do read the intrepid flame article below this one. i say that- because if you all are like me- i only read maybe three posts in on any one blog. that's why i only keep 3 days worth of posts up at any given time. unfortunately, for the readers here anyway, i have been posting way more on each day. :) onwards and upwards.

first off- i am going to start by saying that i was annoyed by one million blogs for peace this week for not having the post topic in a timely fashion. for my concrete and linear brain, it threw things into a bit of a state. unfortunately, there is no shortage of material to work with- so i had to post a post for peace anyway. this is the topic- and one of the issues i want to address:

It has recently been revealed that at least two highly publicized accounts of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War were largely, if not wholly, falsified.
What does this say to you about the motives of those prosecuting the Iraq War?
How much faith do you have that any of the information we are getting about Iraq has validity?

as for the question above- i have no idea what the hell it's asking. i am just going to read it as i see it and go for it. depends on where we are getting the information. i don't trust any corporate media entity or embedded journalist necessarily. the military tends to 'feed' information to these folks- and as we have found out in hindsight, this can be propaganda, planted and staged. there are independent and free lance reports coming out of the middle east and i doubt very much if anyone can fake the bad news coming out of there anymore. case in point- the recent practice of israeli soldiers using palestinians as human shields. the israelis had denied doing this but found it difficult to deny after being caught on tape by a journalist. if the israeli government and military lies about its practices, i think we can safely assume ours does too. take the news with a grain of salt.

we can continue to agree or disagree with the start of the war in iraq- but what we need to focus on is getting out. there is no good reason to remain. the folks who got us into this mess have no reason and no desire to get us out. the iraqi people do not want american forces occupying their country and want us out asap. as for staying the course to save millions of iraqi lives- well, that doesn't seem to be working. last count points to about 650,000 iraqi deaths. and exactly how are we making life better there for the iraqis? we promised to rebuild iraq in our image and what that has amounted to is- a pile of rubble- and a dividing wall (allegedly temporary- like the war?).

"An international conference on the humanitarian crisis caused by the US invasion of Iraq was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 17 and 18. The forum discussed a submission by a number of non-government organisations (NGOs) documenting the needs of more than eight million Iraqis for “immediate assistance and protection”.

'The statistics presented at the conference are staggering when one considers that Iraq was previously one of the most developed nations in the Middle East. Over 50 percent of the population lives on less than $US1 per day. At least four million are assessed as being “food insecure”—meaning they live on the verge of starvation. An estimated 28 percent of Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition and 10 percent are suffering from chronic disease or illness. Iraq now has the highest mortality rate for children under five in the Middle East.'

so, if there is a good reason to continue fighting in iraq- a real reason- i would like to hear it. i am not buying the lame ass arguments that we have to stay or our troops would have died in vain; we need to be there to help the iraqis build their democracy; we need to stay or our oil will fall into other hands; we have to stay because millions of iraqis will die. do better than that. anything less is just rhetoric.