From the Independent

Robert Fisk 

I curl down deep in my bed, because the nights are strangely damp and read by the bedside light, Hans von Sponeck's gripping, painful account of his years as the UN's Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, A Different Kind of War, an analysis of the vicious, criminal sanctions regime levelled against the Iraqi people between 1990 and 2003. Here, for example, is what Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador to the UN wrote in March 2000: "...the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq is inexorably leading to the disintegration of the very fabric of civil society." It was "a situation where an entire generation of Iraqis has been physically and morally crippled". The French ambassador to the UN, Alain Dejammet, spoke similarly of "the very serious humanitarian crisis in Iraq", a crime that would eventually persuade von Sponeck to resign.

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Our media assumes that when the Iraqi puppet regime let sectarianism into Saddam's execution, it was a dreadful mistake. That when the video leaked out it was another mistake.

Wrong. It is part of a deliberate strategy to divide Iraq along ethnic lines, to Balkanize it, because this is the only strategy the US has left.

The media keep taking our leaders' word for it. Every time they tell a lie, the media assumes that they didn't mean it, that it was a mistake - just like the war itself.

But of course they meant it, they're after the oil, isn't it obvious?

Mainstream media will keep losing credibility until it renounces The Presumption of Good Faith.

Yes, Trevbus, what you say is so right! The presumption-of-good-faith is used to spread porkies like soft butter on warm toast. It's the "we did not expect the situation in Iraq to get so bad" routine when Daddy Bush knew so much better in 1991... They (the puppeteers — the rich neocons) try to fool us with an hypocritical bumbling routine... and they use the idiot President, a natural bumbler, as a decoy from their primary goal: the oil. And they use "the war on terror" as a rallying rag every second day. While there is no real "war on terror" as mentioned by the director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, in the UK.

Improvements in Iraq? I hope so for the Iraqi people's sake, but since now 80 per cent of Iraqis hate the Yanks, it's not going to be pretty, especially with more troops coming their way.