Mediaboss Marketing

The West Australian Liberal Party lies in ruins.

For so long the dominant political force in this state, the Liberals have been sent a message by the electorate that is beyond brutal in its force.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Their leader is gone, blue-ribbon territory all over Perth has fallen into Labor hands and the Liberals' Lower House ranks are now so minuscule that they could fit on a tandem bike, outnumbered by the Nationals.

And their stint in the political wilderness could last much longer than the four miserable years that now certainly await the Liberals, after an unmitigated disaster of an election night.

"This is ground zero for the Liberal party," Churchlands MP Sean L'Estrange told party supporters at a function that, somehow, could have been his political wake, with his seat now on a knife-edge.

"The nuclear bomb has gone off."

ABC News: Jessica Warriner

March 13 was never going to be about toppling Mark McGowan for the Liberals, once the Premier began enjoying rockstar popularity in the COVID era.

But as recently as when Zak Kirkup took on the leadership in late November, the hope in the Liberal partyroom was that they could save the furniture.

The WA election has been called for Labor.

Holding onto their 13 seats, maybe even gaining one or two more, was seen as the bar for Mr Kirkup.

Instead, the party has now fallen off a cliff and seems to have lost both its official party status and its role as the opposition.

"Very few people walk away from this catastrophe undamaged," was the stinging verdict from one MP.

Mr Kirkup losing his own seat is one of the telling signs he is the first WA opposition leader to do so, and the first major party leader in WA to suffer that fate in nearly 90 years.

ABC News: Eliza Laschon

But the fact it was one of the least-surprising things to happen on election night shows beyond doubt how badly the campaign went for the blue team.

The Liberal post-mortem will be stinging, with the finger pointing having begun long before polls closed.

One of the greatest causes of ire among Liberals both those who remain and the ones who will spend today cleaning out a career's worth of work in their offices was the party's green energy policy.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals were mystified by it when it was unveiled, believing it further alienated the party's base and torpedoed their hopes in Collie for years to come, while having no significant subset of voters that it could realistically win.

It scared voters on the right and while some on the left may have liked it, they still voted Labor or Green or so the thinking goes.

But beyond the policy arena, the actual campaign itself was a source of immense frustration for some Liberals.

Some MPs felt Mr Kirkup's conceding defeat with 16 days to go consigned the Liberals to irrelevance and turned off voters, who perceived they had given up.

It has many Liberals questioning whether the move to a first-term opposition leader so close to an election was a mistake.

"The energy policy was a debacle," a shellshocked former Liberal leader Mike Nahan said on the ABC's election night panel.

"And I think in the end you will see his statement that 'we have lost', that we had no chance of winning, just was not right."

Furthermore, the party was so cash-strapped that it was outspent dramatically by Labor. Attack ads targeting Mr Kirkup appeared relentlessly with little response.

ABC News: Tabarak Al Jrood

And Labor used 'dirt files' to great success, forcing the Liberals to defend questionable views espoused by numerous candidates while the Opposition made no in-roads in that space.

But, as much as the now-former MPs who will today start dusting off their resumes if they hadn't already were immensely frustrated by the way the party handled the past five weeks, the problems run much deeper than that.

And they started long before Mr Kirkup was even a parliamentarian.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals believe the current dearth of political talent in their ranks can be attributed in part to the failure to attract and nurture those with ability during the years of the Barnett government.

The question of who the next Liberal premier would be has been a source of fear for conservatives since Christian Porter and Troy Buswell left state politics, not a newfound phenomenon.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Then there is the issue of preselection.

The Liberals battled candidate controversies on multiple fronts from one claiming the allegations against Mr Porter were part of some conspiracy related to the state election, to another suggesting a link between 5G and COVID-19.

And those were just the tip of the iceberg.

A significant number of Liberals believe potential quality candidates are choosing not to seek state preselection because there is no realistic chance of success unless they attach themselves to a key party powerbroker.

ABC News: Andrew O'Connor

Winning Liberal preselection in the metropolitan area, without tying yourself to either Nick Goiran or Peter Collier, is pretty unrealistic these days.

Expect to see old Liberal hands demanding urgent party reform in the aftermath of this annihilation, with calls for plebiscite-style preselections and other changes to curtail the influence of powerbrokers.

Most immediately, though, the Liberals need to work out how such a paltry team can hold a politically-dominant Labor government to account while seemingly not even being the official opposition.

Simple tasks like allocating policy portfolios and filling committees will be made extraordinarily difficult by there being so few MPs.

Some MPs believe the Liberals will have no choice but to have coalition discussions with the Nationals, with their only chance of properly holding Labor to account being to work together.

At this stage, it might be David Honey and Libby Mettam flipping a coin to decide who becomes leader although for now, the Liberals have a glimmer of hope that Mr L'Estrange or maybe Bill Marmion could hold on.

ABC News: Gian De Poloni

Whoever gets the job will face the challenge of a lifetime, with the Liberals needing to climb Mount Everest and then some just to make the 2025 election even close to competitive.

As for the departing leader, he will cop plenty of blame from some Liberals for a campaign more than one labelled a "shit show".

But most Liberals admit that the problems run much deeper and will not be easily fixed.

Picking up the pieces from an election night calamity will be a long process as the tiny number of Liberals to survive this bloodbath try to work out how to rebuild a shattered party.

See the original post here:
The WA election has left the Liberals decimated and in the wilderness, facing a long road back - ABC News

Liberal MP Nicolle Flint has conceded her own party could "absolutely" have done more to provide her with support during the "vicious" 2019 election campaign.

Ms Flint, who is the member for the electorate of Boothby in Adelaide's inner-south, recently revealed her intention toquitfederal politics, saying she would not contest the seat at the next election.

The conservative faction MP yesterdaybroke down in tears in Parliament while describing the harassment and stalking she hadendured during her time in politics.

Among the incidents was an act of vandalism before the 2019 election, in which her campaign office was defaced with the word "skank" and other abusive and sexist graffiti.

Supplied

Speaking on ABC Radio Adelaide this morning, Ms Flint repeated her criticisms of political opponents, including Labor, unions, and activist groups including GetUp.

"There is a lot of work we need to do across the board to support women in politics," she said.

"My issues have been the treatment that I received last election through the activities of GetUp, Labor and the unions."

GetUp today vehemently rejected any suggestion it was to blame for the abusive attacks on her office,saying the "harassment experienced by Nicolle Flint" was"abhorrent".

"We conducted a thorough investigation that confirmed that our staff or members were not involved in any of the alleged behaviour levelled against us in this long-running effort to smear our reputation," the organisation today said.

We campaigned in the seat of Boothby and other key seats with hard-right Liberal MPs, but it is simply wrong to characterise our campaign as harassment or misogyny."

When asked by ABC Radio Adelaide host David Bevan, "What about the women in your South Australian branch did they come out and help you?", Ms Flint conceded the SA Liberalsalso had room for improvement.

"David, can I say about the 2019 campaign, no-one was expecting the vicious nature of the campaign, not me, not anybody," Ms Flint responded.

"Could the South Australian division have done more? Absolutely."

Ms Flint said she did receive support from Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

AAP: David Mariuz

Ms Flint recently clashed with South AustralianHuman Services Minister Michelle Lensink, a fellow Liberal, over abortion reform.

Her electorate is held by the Liberals on a margin of just 1.4 per cent, andMs Flint said she would not be reconsidering her move to quit Parliament.

"I won't change my mind, I've made my decision to step down, but what I will be doing is working as closely as I can with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins. I'll be an active part of the review [into the culture of Parliament House]," she said.

"I would love to sit down with some of the senior Labor women and chat to them about how we can all take the aggression out of politics.

"We just need to stop this behaviour from ever happening again. We need to keep people safe, and that's precisely what I said to the Parliament last night, and I'm delighted that people are listening."

The ABC has contacted the SA Liberal branch for comment.

See the article here:
Nicolle Flint admits SA Liberals could have done more to support her during 2019 election - ABC News

My grandmother was effectively a single parent by 1930 after my granddad emigrated to New York in early 1929 when the bottom fell out of the cattle trade in County Down. She and the kids were to follow, but her long illness meant they couldnt.

After Id become a parent myself, my mum told me that every time a plate cracked granny would put it away in the kitchen press. Then when the kids got out of hand, shed go to the cupboard, take out the old plate, and smash it on the ground.

It commanded an immediate silence, and restored order. The sepia images that survive, show from thesmiles on her kids faces that they prospered despite such moments of percussive clarity. It may even have helped them to a better life.

Last Sunday, it was Eoghan Harriss turn to crack some Delft. His uncommonly direct column (even for him) calling for the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to resign after recent revelations had an almost immediate effect.

Rusbridger now knows (if he didnt before) the Irish politics he once dabbled is a real bear-pit. If English politics is about materialism and class, ours is about culture and, until quite recently, it involved a quite lot of death, injury and mayhem.

Where you stand on that revolutionary bloodshed and later civil infractions of the legal and social codes still matters. Yet his resignation as chair of the southern governments Future of Media Commission was both sudden and unexpected.

His fellow commissioner Conor Brady put up the thinest possible defence on his behalf, but it did little other than reanimate Rusbridgers callous insouciance over Roy Greenslades cold partisan attack (now removed) on Mairia Cahill:

Greenslade did not try to deny Cahill had been raped by an IRA member.

The principal point in his blog was that the BBCs Spotlight programme lacked balance in that it did not take account of the fact that Cahill was a leading member of a dissident republican organisation with an anti-Sinn Fein agenda.

This meant vital information was denied to viewers, he claimed. Of course the innuendo, citing unnamed critics of the programme, was that her complaint was motivated by politics.

Note the repetition of that familiar old line, the anti Sinn Fin agenda and fair gaming of Cahillby Greenslades parti prix pen. Its routinely thrown at anyone who questions that partys right to do whatever it thinks is in its own interests.

Before I come to why he had to go, let me sayRusbridger had great convening power. I doubt anyone else would have brought in someone like Simon Kuper and his fearless and penetrating insight on the medias systemic failure on populism.

I never worked at the Guardian as such but from 2006 I was regularly commissioned by the late Georgina Henry, deputised by Rusbridger to run the papers Comment is Free digital platform to write online. It was fun and it took me places.

For instance to the Editors summer party on Londons South Bank in 2006. Being early I met and chatted with Ken Livingstone about a year or so before losing the Mayoralty of London to the man who is now the British Prime Minister.

He was, he argued to a small crowd of us, a policy man, and thought his Tory rival in 2008 would cowpe under pressure of his command of the detail. Turns out that this was a complacent view of the oncoming reality truck that was Boris Johnson.

And complacency is the word. In his book (H/T Tim) Evil Geniuses, Kurt Andersen tells how US liberals, who enjoyed hegemony back in the 60s and 70s, first indulged new extreme market ideologies. Then adopted those values as their own.

He connects thesesoixante-huitards with a new capital class that subsequently freed itself from any obligation to wider society or set its vastly privatised wealth to work. This accommodation with monied individualism was both easy and pain free.

Andersen recalls a moment from 1975 when journalists crossed the picket line of striking printers at The Washington Post, including Bob Woodward, from the start. It was the beginning of the end for the Pressmen, the US print workers union.

Forty years on watching journalists get washed away and drowned by the latest wave of technology induced change Andersen notes that if hed been one of those print workers hed have felt some schadenfreude.

Its odd to watch liberals co-opt themselves into defending ideologies that, on the face of it, are inimical to their professed values. With Greenslade (for many years Fleet Streets own watchdog) that means acceptingsome very odd behaviours:

In 1989 Roy Greenslade made a series of hoax phone calls to his own newspaper, writes Marcus Leroux . Putting on an Irish accent, he pretended to be the friend of an airline pilot who overheard SAS soldiers chatting about an operation in Gibraltar Nick Davies reported in the 2008 book Flat Earth News.

The Newsletter reported Kathryn Johnstons response to hearing a recording of the original conversation between Davies and Greenslade

As a self-appointed media scruineer it doesnt sit very well to hear him laughing and joking about making a fake phone call to pass on information which he says came from republican contacts and using a fake Irish accent to a colleague in the Sunday Times. It is deeply unethical.

It doesnt end there. The Mail reportsthat Greenslade accused Kathryns late husband and former colleague Liam Clarke of

colluding with the security forces to publish false stories about the IRAs commitment to a ceasefire. It was a malicious attack, based on no more than tittle-tattle, yet the damage was real, Mr Clarke later complained.

The allegations were wild, wrong and, for me, dangerous. For a journalist living and working in Northern Ireland to be accused of collusion with the security forces is life-threatening. Once a lie has been printed, it is repeated with regularity. Greenslade was unrepentant.

Journalists were not targeted during the conflict, though several were civilian casualties in the IRAs indiscriminate bombing campaign. The one obvious exception, Martin OHagan was killed by loyalists during the so call peace process.

But anyone who has read Malachi ODohertys Telling Year will know that journalists on the ground, were under constant pressure from one group or the other to turn their copy one way or the other. Murder was the backdrop rather than a threat.

In Rusbridgers final apologiathe Guardian editor recounts a bizarre conversation in 1999 between himself, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and a retired British spook James who told the two leading members of the Provisional movement

their silence on decommissioning the IRAs weapons was seriously damaging their credibility and was leaving Tony Blair and Bill Clinton looking increasingly exposed.

Rusbridger unquestioningly recalls the response from McGuinness If Gerry were to make a speech about decommissioning, said McGuinness, some young lad would come and shoot him tomorrow.

Months later the official deadline in the Belfast Agreement for IRA decommissioning passed in May 2000. As wenow know Adams was merely using that collapsed deadline as a bargaining chip for indemnity for IRA men.

You might think Rusbridger would have been aware of this when he committed those thoughts to paper but his willingness to accept the SF leaders at their word (or their, ahem,partial disclosure) is a too common feature within liberal media.

On both islands. Harris condemned the piece as both arrogant and self-absorbed. And further stated that

in a piece of 23 paragraphs, Mira Cahills name wasnt mentioned until the 21st paragraph.

He also tried the ploy of wrapping himself in the peace process this despite Mira Cahills ordeal having taken place well after the Good Friday Agreement. [Emphasis added]

He makes a further point too about the silencing of a woman who has not only undergone the original rape, but during this (post conflict) same time period that Rusbridger references was being actively re-traumatised by the IRA themselves.

Its not as though we dont have a problem getting rape prosecutions to where they need to be on these islands. In Northern Ireland the number of crown court cases for rape fell by about a quarter from 2017-18 to 2018-19.

And whilst the figure in the south increased by 35% last year

Chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Noeline Blackwell, welcomed the increase, but she said the number of rape prosecutions is still far too low and represents only a fraction of those reported to garda.

The support service estimates around 14 per cent of rape cases reported to garda are sent forward for trial, while it believes 90 per cent of rape victims do not report such crimes at all.

Some complain about the Cahill case as though it were just an inconvenience to the new politics-as-usual. But she only came forward (and later waived her right to anonymity) after Gerry Adams niece sought her own fathers prosecution.

Having heard Harris plate smash, Rusbridger has done the decent thing and walked. Ireland needs its media and in particular, its liberal wing. But that wing must reassess the gap between the values it professes and those it acts upon.

And to begin to consider the likely outcome of the stories they choose to print.

Photo by moritz320 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

Read more here:
Ireland's liberal media must reassess the gap between the values it professes and those it acts upon - Slugger O'Toole

In the midst of our COVID mourning, we might forget the U.S. began a war in Iraq 18 years ago this week.

The war has had various inspiring names: Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2003 to 2010, Operation New Dawn from 2010 to 2011, and Operation Inherent Resolve from August 2014 to the present. At the outset, the Bush administration promised the war would eliminate Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. That sanctions could never work. That fighting would be quick, cheap at $50 billion to 60 billion, controllable, remake Iraq into a democracy, and be won with few civilian, allied or U.S. military casualties.

If this sounds too good to be true, its because it is. The Iraq War at 18 offers lessons for understanding the costs of war. Whatever promises and hopes, war is rarely quick, cheap, effective, or controllable.

On March 19, 2003, the war began with a shock and awe aerial assault that left much of Iraqs major cities in rubble, its top flight medical infrastructure damaged, half its doctors dead or running, its museums looted, and its renowned universities destroyed. US and coalition airstrikes alone killed thousands of civilians from 2003-2011. All told, hundreds of thousands of people were killed and injured most of them Iraqi civilians and soldiers in the U.S. occupation and the civil war spawned by the local power vacuum and conflicts prompted by the invasion. Millions of Iraqis fled the country and many have yet to return.

At the peak of the war in 2007, there were about 165,000 U.S. military boots on the ground and thousands more in the region. There were daily reports of traumatic brain injuries, amputations, and active-duty suicides. One of the first Americans to die was Jose Antonio Gutierrez, a 22-year-old U.S. Marine, killed by friendly fire in Iraq on March 21, 2003. Born in Guatemala and raised mostly in an orphanage, Gutierrez entered the United States without papers at age 14 and became a permanent resident at age 18. He wasnt made a U.S. citizen until after his death.

A generation later, and on the very day last year when the U.S. went into its first COVID lockdown, rocket fire rained down once more and killed Army Spc. Juan Covarrubias, age 27, and Marshall Roberts, age 28, of the Air National Guard in Camp Taji, Iraq. In between Lance Cpl. Gutierrezs and Staff Sgt. Roberts deaths, the DoD has recorded about 4,600 other U.S. service members killed, more than 32,570 service members wounded, not to mention that Iraq was left in a state of historic destruction and social disintegration.

When the U.S. withdrew in 2011, Iraq had not become a democracy, and much of the country had yet to be repaired. Three years later, the U.S. returned to fight a new monster of its own creation: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). When the U.S. returned to Iraq in 2014 to attack ISIS, we once again relied heavily on airpower, to devastating effect. By late 2020, the U.S. led coalition admitted their airstrikes in these regions killed 1,410 civilians. Independent monitoring groups like Airwars think the true number of civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes from 2014-2020 is somewhere between 8,310 and 13,187 civilians. The airstrikes were so intense in places like Mosul, that the U.N. estimated over 8,000 Mosul homes were destroyed.

Today there are still about 2,500 soldiers on the ground in Iraq, with many thousands more deployed in the region, and thousands more U.S. contractors also at work and at risk.

Get the military's most comprehensive news and information every morning

(please select a country) United States United Kingdom Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Congo, The Democratic Republic of The Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote D'ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-bissau Guyana Haiti Heard Island and Mcdonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco Mongolia Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Reunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and The Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia and The South Sandwich Islands Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard and Jan Mayen Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand Timor-leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States United States Minor Outlying Islands Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

Subscribe

By giving us your email, you are opting in to the Early Bird Brief.

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, The Costs of War Project which we direct started looking at the Iraq Wars impact. The total number of people who have died from the Iraq War, including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and Iraqi civilians, had reached at least 189,000 people, including at least 123,000 civilians. That number has only grown higher throughout the years.

But lives are not the only casualties of the last 18 years of war.

Truth and transparency went by the wayside before the war in 2002 and early 2003 when the Bush administration argued that the cause of the war was what we now understand were non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Transparency and decency were again assaulted in March 2003 when the Pentagon directed that the press would no longer be allowed to show the caskets of soldiers as their bodies were returned to Dover Air Force Base and when we learned of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers and contractors in Iraqi prisons.

And, while the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations were careful to claim that no expense would be spared in the care of American troops, the Pentagon budget almost without exception increased no matter how many troops were actually in the war zone, even when annual Iraq War spending itself declined. The Pentagon and State Department say that the Iraq Wars cost about $1 trillion. Even this astonishing figure is an undercounting, not including for instance, the ongoing obligations to care for veterans of the Iraq War and the ways it has increased overall Pentagon spending. The ballooning military budget is now more than half of all discretionary spending, has essentially starved the rest of U.S. discretionary spending.

Congressional authority to declare war also took a hit as the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force the legal basis for the war against Saddam Husseins alleged weapons of mass destruction has been stretched to cover many other, sometimes marginally related uses of force, not only in Iraq but also in Syria or elsewhere. It is, today, finally under strong congressional consideration for repeal.

When the Iraq War became less popular, some then U.S. members of Congress were castigated for voting for it. And some, like John McCain, John Kerry and Joe Biden, have admitted regret for voting in favor of the war. Yet most politicians paid little price for supporting the war or for their overly optimistic assessments of its likely course. Instead, we will all pay the price for this war for decades to come not least in care for Iraq War veterans and lost opportunities for public health, infrastructure, energy transition, and education.

Dr. Neta C. Crawford is the Chair of Boston Universitys Department of Political Science and Dr. Catherine Lutz teaches at Brown University. They co-direct the Costs of War project at Boston University and at Browns Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Editors note: This is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com.

Read the original here:
What the 18th anniversary of the Iraq War teaches us about the costs of war - Military Times

17 March 2021 Baghdad: Dr. Salah El Hajj Hassan, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Representative in Iraq, accompanied by H.E Ambassador Safia Al-Suhail, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Iraq to FAO, met with the Governor of Baghdad, Mr. Mohammed Jaber al-Atta. The discussion focused on FAO's intervention and programs in Iraq and the agriculture sector's challenges in Iraq.

Mr. Al-Atta discussed ways to enhance and strengthen cooperation and coordination with FAO in Iraq. He expressed hope that, through increased collaboration, the organization would rehabilitate the agricultural sector in Baghdad's rural areas to achieve food security and sustainable agriculture and rural development. Noting that these rural areas around Baghdad city have suffered from crises and climate changes.

Ambassador Al-Suhail praised the important role played by FAO in supporting the agricultural sector, achieving food security and sustainable agricultural development, and stressed the need to support the agricultural sector in rural areas of the Baghdad Governorate.

Dr. El Hajj Hassan presented FAO's projects to the Governor in Iraq that support agricultural livelihoods' by revitalizing food production, value chains, and income generation and aim to secure water systems by rehabilitating the irrigation in Iraq. Dr. El Hajj Hassan thanked the Governor for his willingness to support the agriculture sector in Baghdad's rural areas. El Hajj Hassan also stated, "Through FAO projects, FAO will provide the necessary support to improve the agriculture sector that will positively impact all of Iraq and to achieve rural and pre-urban development

At the end of the meeting, the Governor thanked the FAO delegation. He also praised FAO's efforts in Iraq to revitalize the agriculture sector and reduce poverty through its support to food production development and sustainability. He expressed his offices readiness to fully cooperate in developing the agricultural sector in Baghdad's governorate. Dr. El Hajj Hassan assured that FAO will be providing the necessary support to the farmers in Baghdads rural areas.

For more information, please contact:

FAOR Dr. Salah El Hajj HassanEmail: Salah.elhajjhassan@fao.org+9647740846707

Originally posted here:
FAO Representative in Iraq and Ambassador Safia Al-Suhail discussed ways to enhance and strengthen cooperation and coordination with Baghdad...