Within "disaster", tears and laughter

Tired of the pre-US-elections Iraq news from the national media? Check the local news. There you'll see many of the same points made by the network evening news:

A troop of the 4-14 began its morning Thursday on and around Haifa Street, long considered one of the more dangerous main routes in the city. It’s an area of steady traffic, date palms and tall apartment complexes offering any number of vantage points for snipers, the prime source of attacks on coalition forces in Baghdad.

The neighborhood for months has been under the control of the Iraqi security forces, said Capt. Michael Eberhart, commander of this troop, which carries the nickname Assassin Troop.

But now, even many of the Iraqi Army and police are afraid of the violence in the area. Eberhart said his troop’s mission is to determine who’s responsible for the violence and to act as a deterrent. But curbing the ongoing strife between Sunni and Shiite is difficult, he said, because it consists mostly of retaliatory acts.

“It’s just a never-ending cycle,” he said.

But you'll also get the details that don't survive their editorial scrutiny:

Thursday, one of Eberhart’s platoons, headed by 2nd Lt. Mateo Gross and Sgt. 1st Class Curlee Kelley and consisting of four Stryker vehicles, patrolled an area several blocks from Haifa Street accompanied by Iraqi police. The officers joked with the U.S. soldiers as they got out and mingled with the crowd, seemingly at ease with the soldiers nearby. But Gross took charge of questioning local shop owners about the neighborhood violence.
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Later in the afternoon, Gross directed his platoon to an area off Haifa Street deemed safe enough to patrol on foot. The platoon stopped at a small marketplace near a large apartment complex. The building towers over the few shops selling fruits, vegetables, candy and clothing. Parents had gathered to meet their children getting out of school for the day.

Here, Gross said, is a neighborhood where residents seem to be paying little attention to their neighbor’s ethnicity and living in relative peace with one another. As a Christian woman spoke with soldiers, she was choosing vegetables from a non-Christian shop keeper. Gross said that the city of 7 million has many areas like this where the sectarian violence has not torn neighbors apart.
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At another stop, Gross and the other soldiers visited with a clothing store owner, real estate agent and goldsmith. The goldsmith is forthcoming about thieves in the area who became more bold as the presence of coalition and Iraqi forces dwindled in the last months. He, for one, tells the soldiers he’s glad to see them in the neighborhood.

“If we see you guys around, we feel safe,” the goldsmith said.

Those details are news too, of course. They just don't fit the political narrative that's replaced actual balanced reporting in the run up to the US elections - if that "balance" was ever there in the first place.

Of course, the Iraqis have TV News too...

BAGHDAD - The year is 2017, according to the opening credits of the fake news broadcast, and the last man alive in Iraq, whose name is Saaed, is sitting at a desk, working as a television news anchor. He sports an Afro, star-shaped sunglasses, and a button-down shirt.

The Americans are still here, the government is still bumbling, and the anchor wants his viewers to drink their tea slowly so they don't burn themselves. "You cannot go to the hospital during the curfew," he warns.

For Iraqis, the remark is outrageously funny, if only because it's so close to being true.

After a summer of the worst violence since U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, tens of thousands of Iraqis are finding solace and amusement in a new television show whose dark humor makes it an Iraqi version of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

The nightly send-up of a newscast includes weather, sports and business segments and features six characters, all played by the same actor.

With seemingly no sacred cows, it provides insight into how Iraqis see their country's problems, lampooning the Americans, the Iraqi government, the militias, and the head of Iraq's state-owned media company.
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The show is being produced to run only during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, and it airs just as Baghdadis are breaking their fast. It is so popular that many people report being glued to the screen, eating their first meal of the day in small bites between laughs.

Good stuff - and while Americans are accustomed to seeing their government publicly lampooned it's undoubtedly a bit more of a novelty to a people recently under a totalitarian regime. But such things are fragile, and a world that allows them is not easy to build and even more difficult to maintain, and often taken for granted by those who benefit most, complain loudest, and contribute the least to the cause.

Tears are inevitable, but it would be a fine day indeed if when we did leave we could leave 'em laughing, too.

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