Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Otterman’s book tour through NZ has garnered strong coverage in the media and local blogs. Check out:
“Michael Otterman on Erasing Iraq,” by Christine Linnell, Lumiere Reader:
The basic question of “What do Iraqis think?” is what moved Otterman to write the book in the first place. “Some people supported the invasion and some people were against it, but I never met an Iraqi who was for this type of prolonged occupation,” he said. “At the very most, people thought Saddam would be overthrown and then Iraqis would be allowed to chart their own path.”
“The Casualty Count of War,” by Andrew Stone, NZ Herald:
“We have a responsibility in the US, as a country which prosecuted this war, to know what the costs are. We need to know at a very concrete level if our methods were successful.
“If our bombing campaigns and the people we supported on the ground yielded a death count of 600,000 or so, that should give us pause and we should reconsider the methods we used and the reasons we went to war at all.
“Without knowing the human cost – not just the body count but the other costs too – we’re almost blind, we don’t see what the effects of this war really were.”
“Michael Otterman: The ‘unforseen, unthinking consequence’ of Erasing Iraq,” by bronnypop, Christchurch City Libraries Blog:
The session was riveting, and had a deeply appreciative and attentive audience (apart from the dear old ladies sitting next to me, who on discovering which session they had wandered into, said rather loudly, “Oh, dear! That doesn’t sound very nice!”). Nice it wasn’t, but compelling it certainly was, with Sean Plunket making some (rather brave, I thought) comparisons between what is going on in Iraq today, and the Holocaust. As it turns out, however, Otterman’s own father and grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and he is more than happy to discuss the similarities and differences.
“Israel and Iraq questions provide double whammy,” by Janet McAllister, NZ Herald:
Otterman, interviewed by Sean Plunket (who just about kept his own ego in check), started with stats: Nearly five million Iraqis have abandoned their homes since 2003 – the largest movement of people in the Middle East since 1948 (when Israel became a state).
He visited Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan to ask: “What do Iraqis think?” He found that, to many minds, the war had been continuous since 1991, in the form of “genocidal sanctions”. Iraqi views of Saddam were mixed but views on the American occupation since 2003 ranged from bad to worse.
Otterman said ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq had undergone “sociocide” – “the killing of [their] way of life” – since 2003. He called it “evil”.
“Forgotten Victims in a Post 9/11 World,” Books In the City, Auckland City Libraries:
Both [Otterman and Loewenstein] pointed out the failure of the mainstream press to expose the full (and continuing) extent to which torture is being used by the U.S military, and the misleading nature of “Orwellian euphemisms” used such as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and the ultimately sourceless context of any content that begins with “Administration officials say…”. These misleading tones were entrenched in compromised media outlets such as Fox News which operated as commercial businesses.
The lack of coverage was also down to the covert nature of the U.S Government’s military legislation, authorising torture techniques like sense deprivation and sleep deprivation in places outside of the U.S such as Guantanamo Bay, some methods of which were still authorised under the Obama regime; not to mention the increasingly common phenomenon of “embedded jourrnalists” whose reporting would inevitably be heavily partisan.
