The whole picture

Patrick Cockburn, Independent journalist in Baghdad, issued this dispatch on October 26. The headline, "Bush and Blair say things are improving. It's not true: they're getting worse by the day", sums it up:

"It is not true when George Bush, Tony Blair and Jack Straw say that things are improving. They are getting worse by the day. It was announced yesterday that Iraqis had voted in favour of the new constitution. No doubt this will be lauded in Washington and London as an encouraging glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

"But viewed from Baghdad, there is something absurd about the idea that a new constitution - the rules of the game under which the state will be governed - should be taken so seriously abroad when nobody in Iraq obeys the law and in any case there is no state.

"Iraq is full of phoney milestones. The US government is congratulating itself this week on training 200,000 army, police and paramilitary forces. But half of the 80,000-strong Iraqi army consists of "ghost" battalions in which commanders pocket the salaries of non-existent troops."

Read the whole article...and wonder why our media isn't giving us the real picture.