Saturday, December 11, 2004

We ain't passing the "Global Test."

Found this interesting article today in the NYTimes.

When Bush - or any of the politico psyops folks deployed in the Mass Media Propaganda Machine - portrays the Iraq mission as staffed by a "Coallition of the Willing," they are just screwing with your mind.

Check these numbers out - slice:

"I'm now at the end of my four-nation tour of the "coalition of the willing" (I'm skipping such other important members as Tonga, with 45 troops in Iraq, and Moldova, with 12). Since the White House has emphasized how firmly our partners are standing behind us, I interviewed the leaders of the Baltic nations and tried to get each of them to commit to sending 1,000 or more troops...

...I don't mean to demean Lithuania's 105 troops in Iraq, Latvia's 122, Estonia's 55 or even Norway's 10. For the wife and two sons of Olafs Baumanis, a Latvian soldier killed in June, the emptiness is unfathomable.

While his sacrifice was no joke, our coalition is. What I am trying to demean is the idea that we have a powerful coalition behind us: of the 28 allied countries that still have troops in Iraq at this moment, only eight have more than 500. Most are there as window dressing. And because of language and equipment difficulties, some contingents - like Macedonia's 28 or Kazakhstan's 29 - may be more trouble than they are worth.

Mr. Bush corralled foreign leaders into his "coalition of the willing," but never tried to win over foreign public opinion. So one poll shows that 80 percent of Latvians are against the deployment. Latvia's president, Vaira Vike-Freiburga, acknowledged that it would be difficult to extend the troop commitment beyond June...

End slice:

If the rest of the Global Village is against it, why are we for it? Because we got snookered into going.

See my 13 Dec post on the "War Time Investment."


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