Catapulting Happy Faces

By now we have all heard that the US is still paying to put happy face stories in the Iraqi newspapers. It’s one more lame attempt to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

Okay, lets say you’re an Iraqi in Iraq. Yesterday half your family was blown all to hell as they shopped at the market. Your heart is forever broken and your life will never be the same. You glance at the newspaper this morning and you read that the soldiers from the US completed painting a school yesterday in a town somewhere in your country. That story is not going to do much to heal your broken heart, is it?

We invaded that country for whatever actual reasons, no one really knows. We have been, if not the direct source every time, at least a contributing causation of so incredibly many deaths. There is no damned happy face story planted or otherwise that will gloss over what this war has cost the people of Iraq. I doubt they think of Americans as liberators any longer, if they ever did. Probably now they think of us as people who barge in, take over, and bring death to their loved ones.

We may be able to place happy face stories in Iraqi newspapers but we can’t place happy faces on the Iraqi people. It's much too late for that.