Submitted by Fred Willis, Nov 19, 2006 00:53

You guys should

a) start reporting what is really going on in the Middle East for a change. Nobody does. I lived in Israel of 5 years and I claim that nothing bad and nothing good gets reported about Israel. Whatever is going on there is so distorted by the Editorial filtering done by all Western media, that I when I read a Western newspaper or magazine while I was in Israel on any topic whatsoever, I could not square what I was reading with what I was seeing right before my eyes.

To give you an example, one day I was walking around Haifa and it was unusually calm and mellow. I knew something was up and I bought a Middle Eastern edition of USA Today and on the third page it said "Histadrut on strike. Israel in chaos." Maybe the ports and Ben Gurion were a mess, but things work better in Israel when the Histradrut is on strike. Israel is terrific when the Histadrut is on strike. Who ever reported that Israel was in "chaos" was, in fact, lying.

b) Come to the realization that the war in Iraq is lost and probably was lost within 90 days of our invasion. About the best we can do now is redeploy our troops to towns that are not are not participating in the civil and protect these towns from going into the abyss and then patrol the borders to stop the influx of outside fighters and armaments. In other words, pull out of Baghdad and the Sunni triangle COMPLETELY and write them off as total losses to our influence. The only other thing to do is quadruple the number of troops we have over there and toss about 1,000,000 people in jail. Are we going to do that?

If we cannot deliver a country to those Iraqis who are not participating in their civil strife, we can at least protect them from it. That much is our duty.

Fred Willis
Chicago, Illinois

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