G.I.'s Ban Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies

I expect it's a pragmatic effort, and to some extent an experiment: if the closure puts 100 people in the street, no problem. 1,000, encourging. 10,000: evidence of a significant political problem long term. 100,000... well, at least you tried.

So far, it's in the "significant future problem category", and that's something worth knowing, even if it's pretty unsettling

For the life of me, looking at the European colonial experience in such nations, I don't see a winning strategy for this one - our intentions may be different, but to the local populations they can be made to appear the same.

Ironic, and typical of NYT bias. The headline implies the US is deciding what is and is not "true" in Iraqi media. (It sure caught my eye.) The story tells the real reason. The headline should have read, "G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Advocating Violence Against G.I.'s."

"They will never understand it in that part of the world.....Violence is encoded in the Arab DNA."

Don't know about "never"; the Islamic world is being forced by events to traverse within two or three generations a path that took us around 800 years - and even today (when we no longer much tend to religious warfare between ourselves) a look back over the last 100 years of Western history suggests that whatever proportion of our violent behavior is encoded within human DNA was ladled out in a pretty evenhanded manner.

I hope our own government would step in if the majority of Americans were being led by the National Enquirer. The hope of theirs is to incite violence against Americans and put in a Islamic state like Iran. That's already a failure in Iran, but who can tell them that?

L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.

Printing something like this in Baghdad is like throwing gasoline on a burning house. There are vast numbers of people here sitting on the fence that easily could be swayed by lies and propaganda and commit acts of violence. It seems like almost every swinging al-Richard over here has an AK and an anger management problem. Many of them want us to help them; many are not yet sure.

Iraqis that buy into this stuff will be susceptible to joining groups that are trying to kill U.S. soldiers and destabilize the country. It is happening all the time. People on both sides deserve better, especially considering the circumstances. Right now is not the time for wild, baseless, incindiary publications.

But the letter outlining the reasons for taking action against Al Hawza did not cite any material that directly advocated violence. Several Iraqi journalists said that meant there was no basis to shut Al Hawza down.

I agree. The answer to the lies: print the truth. Show how debate works in an open society.

Bad move by Bremer.

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