I Cogitate

Sig Christenson of the San Antonio Express-News ridicules comments by politicians, laments the lack of reporters covering the war, and cites ground rules that are crippling for photojournalists. He says the media aren’t pressing for answers to vital and obvious questions, such as what plans the Pentagon has for an exit strategy.

Sig Christenson
COMMENTARY
 August 06, 2007
saddamscribe@yahoo.com

Call it a Katrina Moment, the hour where unbelievable lies passed off as official truth and slander against journalists sparks spontaneous outrage in the ranks.

Think of it as PETA member watching a certain NFL quarterback electrocuting a bloody dog and you get an idea of how mad some of us scribes in harm’s way get.

That’s pretty much what happened when Sen. John McCain, fresh from touring a Baghdad market, suggested that we war correspondents haven’t reported the good news in Iraq.

“The new political-military strategy is beginning to show results," McCain, R-Ariz., wrote in the April 8 edition of the Washington Post. “But most Americans are not aware because much of the media are not reporting it or devote far more attention to car bombs and mortar attacks that reveal little about the strategic direction of the war.

“I am not saying that bad news should not be reported or that horrific terrorist attacks are not newsworthy. But news coverage should also include evidence of progress.”

I was in Baghdad the day he toured the market and knew better. Of course, it wasn’t anything new in the propaganda war for right-wing hearts and minds but it was so laughable.

As Iraq correspondents know from hard experience, the simple act of entering a relatively pacified area of the city ­ say the once-notoriously violent Haifa Street ­ last spring required a long line of Army gun trucks and heavily armed soldiers.

So, too, did McCain’s Shorja market dog-and-pony show.

Republican Rep. Mike Pence likened the place to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana,” his home state.

No Iraqi could be any further from Indiana. And nothing in Iraq is normal, except death. I blew a gasket in my Green Zone compound. It wasn’t just that these politicians were trying to turn the media into Swiss cheese again. It wasn’t that they were shamelessly trying to score points with their base. Nope, it was their galling dishonesty.

Everybody knows there’s a war on in Iraq. What they don’t realize is there are actually four wars ­ the one to defeat insurgents and terrorists, another to win support for America’s occupation among a majority of Iraqis and yet a third for hearts and minds among the president’s supporters in the United States.

The fourth is a war for reporters and editors: It is to find and report the truth while staying alive to file another day in Iraq. If we lose this war, you lose, too. Instead of seeing Iraq as it is, you’ll see it the way someone with an agenda wants.

"...Think of Iraq as Katrina squared and it makes sense for the media to launch a surge of its own, if only because our credibility is at stake. Let us have no one say of the media in this era, as Senator Hiram Johnson did in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes, is truth.'"

America’s illusory strategy in Iraq
David Gardner
Financial Times
August 9 2007

Future historians of how Iraq was lost will, of course, alight on the memoirs and the memos of those who drove the policy, measuring declaration against execution, ambition against outcome. They will savour the solipsism of a Paul Bremer, the US viceroy whose disbandment of the Iraqi army left 400,000 men destitute and bitter, but armed, trained and prey to the insurgency then taking shape – but whose memoir paints him as a MacArthur of Mesopotamia.

They will be awed by the arrogance and fecklessness of a Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary and theorist of known unknowns, who summed up the descent into anarchy and looting in the hours after Baghdad fell (when, very possibly, Iraq was lost) – “Stuff happens”.

But their research will be greatly assisted by the diligence of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, which keeps on unearthing the bottomless depths of incompetence behind the Bush administration’s misconceived adventure in Iraq.

So, in sum. Having upturned the Sunni order in Iraq and the Arab world, and hugely enlarged the Shia Islamist power emanating from Iran, the US finds itself dependent on Tehran-aligned forces in Baghdad, yet unable to dismantle the Sunni jihadistan it has created in central and western Iraq. Ignoring its Iraqi allies it is arming Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda. And, by selling them arms rather than settling Palestine it is trying to put together an Arab Sunni alliance (Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) with Israel against Iran. All clear? How can anyone keep a straight face and call this a strategy?

Opinion
USA TODAY
Consequences and truth: Myths from Washington
Aug 10,  2007

As the warring Shiite factions in Basra demonstrate, Iraq is descending into a civil war that pits different sects and tribes against one another, and against the United States.
 
To listen to President Bush, however, it's easy to come away with the impression that the major source of anti-U.S. violence in Iraq is al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11.

"Some say that Iraq is not a part of the broader war on terror," the president said recently. "They claim that the organization called al-Qaeda in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon — that it's independent of Osama bin Laden and it's not interested in attacking America. That would be news to Osama bin Laden."

The reality is that Iraq is a patchwork of rival groups and tribes. The Shiites divide in many ways: secular and religious, pro- and anti-Iranian. That poses dangers and opportunities. As with Sunnis in Anbar province, U.S. alliances might work with some. But forging them requires a recognition that U.S. forces are not just fighting al-Qaeda but are in the midst of complex sectarian warfare.

How to prevent a full-blown civil war is not obvious. It might not be possible. Even so, Americans deserve a more honest picture than the "us against the terrorists" one drawn by the White House.

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