Oliver Willis

1 Response to “Angelina Jolie In The Washington Post”

1. 1 Wellstone
   Feb 29th, 2008 at 9:54 am

   Here’s an outstanding comment at the WaPo on Ms. Jolie’s Op-Ed piece:

   Well, it’s nice to see that Angelina Jolie and the Rush Limbaugh talk radio crowd are all agreed on how great the US occupation is.

   What a pity that the people of Iraq, every single time they’re asked in an opinion poll, strongly disagree.

   All this talk of how “we mustn’t abandon the Iraqis” is really touching, but for the small fact that most Iraqis are begging us to abandon them and leave their country.

   Of course Jolie can hear the opposite opinion from Maliki and some Green Zone US brass, which seems to be pretty much the only people she talked to.

   If she’s going to come here and plead on behalf of the Iraqi people, she has a duty to plead for the things they actually want, not for something that they’ve clearly and repeatedly said they don’t want.

   This whole argument - “we should stay to help”, “no we should help people at home first” etc, is completely false. The Iraqis don’t think this IS helping them.

   All opinion polls show Iraqis want US troops out. All opinion polls show Iraqis have no faith in the Surge. All opinion polls show that US troops are STILL getting more and more unpopular in Iraq with each passing month. Opinion polls show that more Iraqis say they have witnessed abuse of civilians by Coalition forces than by Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers, militia or al-Qaeda. Opinion polls clearly show, and have done for a long time, that a great majority of Iraqis say the presence of Coalition forces makes the security situation worse. With each successive poll, more and more Iraqis, now a large majority, say the 2003 invasion was a very bad thing. With each poll, the number of Iraqis who approve of attacks on Coalition forces rises. All of these indicators are STILL getting worse.

   So are deaths among Iraqi civilians, which have stopped falling and rose again this month.

   Angelina Jolie may speak for Gen Petraeus or Nouri al-Maliki, but she doesn’t speak for the Iraqi people, and she doesn’t speak for the UN. Most Iraqis, if they could read this article, would vigorously disassociate themselves from her sentiments.

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