for the "Is it Vietnam yet?" ignoramouses...

Iraqi council blasts Arab media
From correspondents in Baghdad
14jul03 Sunday Times
THE new 25-member Iraqi Governing Council savaged the Arab media today for romanticising deposed dictator Saddam Hussein and turning a blind eye to the atrocities he committed against his own people.

"I say this to the Arab media: stop advising the Iraqis to fight the Americans," Nasseer al-Shadershi, the Sunni Muslim head of the Iraqi Democratic Current, told reporters to a roar of applause.

He was joined by Mohammed Barhul Ulom, a Shi'ite cleric who fled Iraq in 1991 for London.

"These media are threatening us from the first day of the war until now," he said, lambasting some Arab media circles for glorifying Saddam in the build-up to the US-led war which triggered revulsion and mass protests across the Arab world.

"Saddam is gone, he's history, he's never coming back."

He scolded the media for ignoring the crimes of Saddam, invoking the 1988 gassing of the Kurds and the brutal supression of the Shi'ite and Kurdish uprising at the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War.

"Come see the mass graves," he said, to a furious round of applause.