Signal to America

Up to 300,000 Iraqis demonstrate peacefully against occupation

Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis who yesterday in the streets of Baghdad demanded an end to occupation of their country numbered up to 300,000. The scale of this demonstration was understated and minimized in much US media.

Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post is usually a good reporter on Iraq and he was able to write that ``tens of thousands'' protested. While Dexter Filkins at the New York Times expressed the numbers similarly, he saw fit to emphasize that ``far fewer people took part than the one million Mr. Sadr's aides had predicted.''

Going rightward on the spectrum, Fox News could not ignore the story, but they could not bring themselves to elevate the concept that this action was a protest against the US occupation into the headline either. Instead the Fox headline over their AP release reads, ``Shiites Mark Anniversary of Fall of Baghdad''. In fairness however, their lead does make it clear that this was a protest against occupation.

However the US media tries to cut this, the message is clear that a lot of Iraqis take democracy seriously, are going to cast more of their influence than just a ballot in an anonymous election, and wish to send a message to Bush that his righteous words on the subjects of freedom and democracy are going to have to have their true meaning in Iraq.

Update Sunday 11:52: I fixed a confusing phrase and a misspelling. Reviewing more of yeterday's coverage, a couple of trends are clear. One, it always is underscored that the protesters were ``largely supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr,'' with the subtext that this somehow discredits the demonstration. Second, the numbers game -- for example, Gaiutra Bahadur for Knight Ridder wrote that while authorities were ``bracing for a million protestors and attacks by terrorists ... the numbers that al-Sadr's spokesmen had predicted and had tried to drum up from their pulpits did not materialize.''

In fact, Bahadur writes, ``Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani last year was able to get nearly 100,000 Iraqis into the streets to press U.S. authorities for elections.''

Now as Juan Cole has referenced, yesterday's protest in fact may have been three times larger than Sistani's.