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"Seeing" with blinkers on

John McCain, US presidential hopeful, has been visiting Baghdad. He was rather up-beat about how things are going. In the company of 3 colleagues, he visited the market in Baghdad, as The Age reports:

"Senator McCain and his three colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — "Like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime," offered Republican Mike Pence.

Perhaps some folks back home believed him. It seems the reality of his "visit" needs to be considered with these facts in mind, as Stephen Elliott writes on The Huffington Post:

"John McCain recently walked through a Baghdad market where he had tea and afterward declared that America wasn't getting the full story on all the good stuff that was happening in Iraq. One of the reasons for that is probably that it's not safe for journalists to leave their hotels. And also, many educated Iraqis have left Iraq.

Further, freelance Iraqi journalists are afraid to work with westerners because they don't want to be beheaded by Iraqis or shot by American troops. The same for translators and those that really opened their arms to the Americans, as documented in George Packer's recent article in the New Yorker.

But what was really absurd, as everyone knows at this point, is that McCain traveled with 100 heavily armed soldiers, attack helicopters circling overhead. So yeah, the world's a safer place when you have your own mobile Green Zone. Every foot he walked in Baghdad (wearing a bullet proof vest) probably cost Americans $10,000 for security. Or more. If you need that much security, and a bullet proof vest, then things probably aren't going so well where you are. Hence, all the bad news out of Iraq."


The Age reports also records the reaction of the locals to McCain's visit and the realities at the market. Needless to say it provides a totally different picture to McCain's totally myopic and totally wrong view of things.

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