Trafficking In Spin

In a long WaPo piece about women starting to drive in Iraq after being driven off the streets by violence and religious extremists, Bill Ardolino spots and emails this deeply buried lede.

“The country is developed now. It’s a period of fast change,” she said. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, she noted, Iraq has ceased to be cut off from the world. Its citizens have acquired satellite TV, cellphones, computers.

Gee, it’s like they were liberated or something.  Note the passive voice here: ”the fall of Saddam Hussein,” cause unmentioned, effected these wondrous changes.  Somehow though, when the effects are negative, we always get a reference to “the U.S.-led invasion” as the implied root cause, even if the direct cause is obviously the savage religious extremists we’ve spent the last 5 years fighting on behalf of Iraqis:

 Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, women in the Iraqi capital have virtually disappeared from behind the wheel. With gun battles raging, the police force collapsing and the traffic lights dead, highways turned into a Mad Max world. Even today, you can travel for a half-hour across the sprawling city and not see a single woman driving.

Of course some of those Saddam-era police forces had been torturing and mutilating political dissidents, which was a large part of why we were there, and explains why most Iraqis seem to believe the invasion has affected the country positively in most regards. 

But hey, women could drive!  Well, except the ones whose hands were cut off.  And I expect suffering the attentions of Saddam’s professional rapists (or the amateur opportunistic variety practiced by his sons) tended to leave the female victims with a less gregarious and extroverted affect.

Oddly enough, the article also fails to mention something more germane:  there are several times more cars in Iraq now than in 2002 (p49), when buying a car essentially required one to get permission from the regime.