Times Online: Iraqis Prefer Misery Over Saddam

By Kurt Nimmo

"Good news for neocons. Iraqis, who we are to believe revel in collective masochism, overwhelmingly approve of the destruction of their social infrastructure and prefer occupation at gunpoint, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and sectarian violence and murder over the rule of Saddam Hussein, or so Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online would have us believe.

“Most Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today,” the neocon newspaper reports. “The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.”

Naturally, this “opinion poll,” obviously skewered, is for public consumption in Britain and the United States......

But then, of course, Iraqi children like unemployment and poverty, same as Palestinian kids do.

“The UN children’s agency UNICEF has said that Iraq’s maternal mortality rates have increased dramatically over the last 15 years. In 1989, 117 Iraqi mothers out of 100,000 died during pregnancy or childbirth. That ratio has now increased by 65 per cent,” Reuters reported last December.

But then, of course, Iraqi mothers welcomed Bush Senior’s Iraq Invasion I, twelve years of brutal and decimating sanctions, and Bush the Lesser’s invasion and occupation, resulting in three quarters of a million dead people, piled up on the 1.5 million people who perished since 1991, bringing the toll well over a staggering 2 million. Iraqi mothers are proud of skyrocketing infant immortality rates. It is an encyclopedic accomplishment.....

Indeed, amidst generally ignored antiwar protests and futile efforts by Democrats to yank the war funding rug out from beneath Bush and the neocons, the balkanization of Iraq is well underway. “The chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent said on Saturday that Iraq’s ‘very fragile’ security and its suffering economy continue to prompt the flight of people from their homes across war-torn Iraq,” reports Ya Libnan. “In an interview with CNN, Dr. Said Ismail Hakki addressed the issue of displacement, a dire symbol of the cost of the four-year-old war. He cites large numbers of refugees, people who flee to other countries, and internally displaced people, those who flee to other parts of their country over this last year.” In short, the bantustanization of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines is well advanced.

But then most Iraqis want to live on reservations, locked in open-air prisons guarded by U.S. soldiers (as we are told continually the United States will not leave Iraq anytime soon), same as the Palestinians do....."