Winning Hearts And Minds
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Good Decisions, The War On Terrorism, WarWhile I don’t know if I could consider this actually good news out of Iraq, it certainly is heart warming to say the very least.
Thirteen years old, small and skinny, Ayad was severely burned and blinded in one eye when an American cluster bomb blew up in his face at the beginning of the Iraq war.The explosion blasted thousands of fragments into his skin and left scars deeper than that. The village boys tease him, calling him “Mr. Gunpowder.” Even on sweltering days, Ayad wraps a scarf around his face when he leaves home, and most nights he sleeps with sunglasses still on.
But all that may change.
On Friday, Ayad and his father walked into a laser surgery clinic in Washington to begin a series of treatments to clear his skin.
The compassion of some may help win the hearts and minds of others.
Found via Kinetic Thought, which happens to be a centrist blog authored by an anonymous former member of the current Bush Administration.
Intriguing…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 and is filed under Good Decisions, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 20th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
No bias there.
While I agree with KT’s assessment regarding how to win, the story in question, taken in the context of NYT’s incessant lies of omission with respect to ALL that happens in Iraq and the rest of the world, is IMHO nothing more than exploitation of a boy’s injuries, reinforcement of the lie that some guy associated with the Defense Department (Robert Reilly) is homophobic, and generally an implication that it requires the actions of a gay activist and affluent dermatologists in Washington to atone for one more in a long list of U.S. “atrocities” – in short, everything that the NYT editorial staff dreams about, assuming they actually sleep at night.
And I note that while we’re reminded in several spots that it was an *American* bomb (which I guess we can all take on faith) that injured this poor child, the car bomb that killed Marla Ruzicka and colleague was apparently created by no one and detonated itself. Aliens, maybe.
If the NYT – and the Bush Administration, for that matter – were truly interested in winning hearts and minds by showing both sides of the conflict, they could start by covering some of the enormous list of good news they ignore every week:
http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2005/07/good-news-from-iraq-part-31.html
Get glass of your favorite beverage first. It is a LONG friggin’ list.
[note: if/when NYT's site stops sending back 'no data' responses for requests for page two, I'll gladly take retract any comments if NYT redeems itself on P.2 of the article.]
July 21st, 2005 at 9:33 am
[...] demia as well, but less so. My subjective perceptions and analyses (see my reaction to the NYT ‘hearts and minds’ article – I do this in my sleep now), coupled with [...]