Journalism and Democracy Book

Reese Erlich was at Google to promote his book The Iran Agenda and though I was too late to get a copy of it, he had a few copies of this book for sale, so I got one for $10. It was published just before the U.S. went in Iraq, so the tone throughout is of impending war with still a fleeting hope for peace. It all seems so long ago.

A long laundry list of the lies perpetrated by the Bush administration as it built its case against Saddam Hussein and how the media were in on it.

The two most interesting pieces are analyses of a speech by President Bush and the text of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. Each sentence is commented by multiple political experts. It was really interesting to see the use of language and how innocuous sentences can be twisted to mean anything.

Again, many of the facts are anecdotal and even though tragic, I sometimes wondered how widespread some of the opinions were. For instance, the authors blame the sanctions imposed on Iraq for the hardships endured by the civilian population. Not lifting these sanctions is causing a humanitarian crisis within the country. How much of it is really the responsibility of the parties enforcing the sanctions and how much is the responsibility of the Iraqi government?