The General Lied at Yawn

So the Petraeus and pony show makes its way back to Capitol Hill and how does the media frame his visit? It's all about McCain, Clinton, and Obama. You see, the Iraq War is just a sideshow for our election, the difficult final Jeopardy! question for the three contestants.

One more reason our country's screwed.

Here's the UK Guardian in a story about the struggle to figure out how many Iraqis have died in this boondoggle:

So five years after Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion of Iraq against the wishes of a majority of UN members, no one knows how many Iraqis have died. We do know that more than two million have fled abroad. Another 1.5 million have sought safety elsewhere in Iraq. We know that the combined horror of car bombs, suicide attacks, sectarian killing and disproportionate US counter-insurgency tactics and air strikes have produced the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world. But the exact death toll remains a mystery.

And then there's this tidbit I hadn't ever heard, which answers the "of course there have been lots of deaths, those damn terrorists killing Iraqis!" comment:

[The Iraq Body Count, an independent UK-based research group] which has produced the lowest figures reveal that the Americans killed four times more civilians in the first two years of the war (thereby provoking armed resistance to the occupation) than al-Qaida-linked insurgents did, in spite of the media's emphasis on car bombs and suicide attacks.

It's worth looking at all the material the Guardian has on its Iraq page, not just for what it tells us about that godforsaken country, but for what it tells us about what journalism could be.