A New Phase of Bright Spinning Lies about Iraq
by Norman Solomon

What's on the horizon for 2006 is that the Bush administration will strive to put any real or imagined reduction of US occupation troop levels in the media spot light. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use massive air power in Iraq.

It's a process already underway, as independent journalist Dahr Jamail - who worked on the ground in Iraq for more than eight months of the US occupation - pointed out in a mid-December article titled "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation." As he put it: "The American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance - and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing."

Yes, we should demand swift withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. But, at this point, to do so without also demanding an end to US bombing of Iraq is to fall into a trap laid by the war makers in Washington. This kind of thing has happened before - with devastating results for people trying to survive a Pentagon air war that was receiving little US media attention.


Full story here.