NEWS FROM IRAQ (Part III)

Part I - No News is Good News

Part II - The More Things Change

Part III - Waving the Flag

Is the mainstream media to blame for faulty perceptions of the war in Iraq? Or are they reporting simple facts, and letting readers decide for themselves?

An interesting discussion developed recently at Jay Rosen's Press Think Blog. Rosen's piece was a response to a post at NRO's new media blog, and the result was a discussion of the media's role in covering war. Both posts centered on this excerpt from Over There: From The Bronx to Baghdad, New York Times reporter Alan Feuer's book on covering the Iraq war.

His quarrel with Franken had begun the very moment Franken had expressed his horror that Fox News anchors wore American flag lapel pins on the air.

?How can you be a patriot and a journalist?? Franken had asked. ?They?re mutually exclusive occupations.? T.R., who considered himself both, had asked why Franken could not love his country, to which had come the answer, ?America is not my country. I?m a citizen of the world.?

?Like Danny Pearl?? T.R. had asked. ?You are American, Bob? it is a nonnegotiable fact.?

?My goodness,? Franken had said. ?I think your employers at the New York Times would be horrified, horrified! to hear you say a thing like that.?

Meanwhile, perhaps unaware of the debate, Michael Yon reports from Iraq:

Reporters who can't get behind the scenes at Disneyland without an entourage of Marketing and Communication handlers trailing their every move can have unfettered access to the battlefield here in Iraq. The few journalists who are here have an astonishing array of options for how they might cover combat operations. A reporter for a major magazine might "embed" with insurgents, and then with US forces, and then back again with insurgents, and so on, until they have enough points of view to add dimension to their perspective.

A journalist not wishing to embed with US forces is free to apply for an Iraqi visa, fly to Baghdad, and hire a car and an interpreter who can drive them around town. They can knock on doors and talk directly with people; visit hospitals, talk with doctors; stop by the side of the road and talk with shepherds; or even hang out in a village and help make the goat cheese. Iraqi people are generally polite and usually more than willing to offer opinions about what's happening in their neighborhood.

Of course, the major problem with eschewing a close military presence is the enemy's proclivity to kidnap and behead journalists whose reports portray insurgents in a negative or violent way. This puts ethical journalists in a tight spot where they have the freedom to roam but not to report the truth; whereas journalists who embed with US forces often report very negatively. I recall the stories of one magazine writer in Baquba who spent days looking for disgruntled soldiers?of course she found them?and wrote negatively. The same writer came to Mosul. The soldiers may not like people who do this, but they certainly will not behead them. Whether reporters elect to travel with the military or to go it alone, the fact is that any journalist who wants battlefield access will find it in Iraq.

Somewhere deep in a dumpster in DC are the shredded remnants of an optimistic military plan for Iraq that had three steps: topple the government, replace it, and go home.

Occasionally a journalist passes through for a short embed, but they don't really see much by "drive-by reporting" as this kind of ride-along is called. Since I am not a journalist, and prefer to spend long periods with units, I see things others miss, and sometimes it's impressive stuff. Some of the technology and various forms of intelligence that Deuce-Four uses defies the imagination. I hope that someday the Army clears me to tell the whole story.

Despite the high-tech flourish, most of the genuine intelligence actually comes from detainees who cough up their cellmates like cats choking on hairballs. Another source of reliable intelligence is the local population, who are ever more confident in the effectiveness and staying power of the new government, and increasingly angry with the depravity of the terrorists.

Day 17: Three Algerian homicidists arrive in Mosul. Two of them had flown from Tunis, Tunisia to Damascus, Syria. They kept the airplane ticket stubs, then made their way via the Jihadist equivalent of the underground railroad: walking through the Syrian countryside, hitching rides, taking buses, and staying at a series of safe houses which they are conscientious enough to document. They keep a diary. After about 30 days of adventure traveling, the three reach a safe house in Mosul. Meanwhile, perhaps in a large-scale display of collective guilt, the Syrian government protests loudly and too much at what they claim are false accusations from the US government that terrorists are using Syria as a conduit to Iraq.

Day 19: Moving on hot intelligence, Deuce-Four conducted nine simultaneous raids on May 19th. One insurgent in particular was believed to know the locations of others. If the Deuce-Four had gone in and just shot the man, he would be dead and useless, but instead LTC Kurilla asked him about the locations of two predominant terrorists. The insurgent answered, "For me to give the locations of these two men would be treason. However, in Iraq we have a saying: if death comes to greet you at your door, introduce him to your brother." The soldiers loaded the Strykers and headed to that location. A capture-cascade had begun.

Day 20: It was just after midnight when the man who had said, "For me to give the locations of these two men would be treason"?led Deuce-Four to the house?"However, if death comes to greet you at your door, introduce him to your brother," where, SMASH, the soldiers rushed in. At first the Algerians were silent, their eyes noticeably bloodshot. They appeared sedated, reflexes on a time delay, as if they had just used opium. The three "martyrs" had been traveling for about thirty days before sneaking into Mosul. Since their arrival 48 hours earlier, apparently they had been hanging around, doing drugs, killing time, you know, just waiting to explode.

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The owner of the house was a known mortar cell leader. The best thing about insurgent cell leaders is their meticulous record-keeping. No slaves to posterity, rather, their detailed notes of terrorist activities and videotapes of their operations, serve as proof for payment. Many insurgents simply work for hire. The man's diary contained entries dated all the way back to the fall of Baghdad?including their successful attacks against Iraqis and Americans, and also those that failed, carefully noting the reasons for the failures. Comparing the entries with actual SIGACTs would later verify the accuracy of this record, and seal the fate of Mosul's answer to Capone's bookkeeper.

No one had the time that night to scour the diary in Arabic, but had they read the entry for May 17th they would never have lowered their guns. For there it was, plain as the ink on the page:

May 17th: Praise Allah, 3 Algerians have come to my house today. 2 are willing to do whatever it takes and be martyrs. 1 is in search of his brother.

The four men had been taken into separate rooms. My neighbors, John Welch and Erik Ramirez, each took Algerians into rooms, while LTC Kurilla had the third. Two other soldiers stayed with the Iraqi cell leader. LTC Kurilla had one Algerian jacked up against a wall and began questioning him?the man was strangely and completely sedate, clearly under the influence of drugs. When he began talking, both interpreters noticed his foreign accent immediately and they started shouting to the Americans, "These men are foreigners!"

As if hit with buckets of ice water, all four men snapped to life and began struggling against the soldiers. The three Algerians went rabid, and the one with Ramirez slipped out the flex-cuffs Ramirez had just put on. Too close for rifles, this was hand-to-hand combat.

Take a look back at the LA Times coverage of Operation LIGHTNING in Baghdad from part two of this series:

As Iraqi commanders have deployed about 40,000 troops for a security crackdown in Baghdad, violence elsewhere has raised concern that other trouble spots have been left more vulnerable to insurgent attacks.

Assaults in Mosul during the last five days have claimed the lives of 11 people and wounded another 11. In the latest attack in the northern city, insurgents fired mortar rounds at a police station Monday, killing at least one civilian.

Yon describes a full month of bloody skirmishes in the streets of Mosul, complete with body counts. Being embedded with the US Army, he is free to give all the unclassified details, and his words and pictures capture the reality of combat in Iraq the way that traditional media has utterly failed to.

And the reality of the peaceful majority of Iraq too:

Dohuk is a welcoming place. After walking or taking taxis inside and around the city for two days, I covered enough ground and talked with enough people to see that while the welcome is clear for American, British, and other visitors, troublemakers can expect an entirely different greeting. People in Dohuk say they have no intentions of going back, or of carrying useless boulders from the past as they move forward.

After being in a war zone for nearly half a year, a few days in Dohuk becomes a chance to reconnect with civilized society, bustling with a people in hurried pursuit of progress. Seeing a little girl tucked away in a corner of her family's stall in the marketplace, absorbed in a book she?s reading about the solar system, it's easy to peek over her shoulder and peer into her imagination, and see it take her into space as Iraq's first astronaut. In her young life, never having known the fiery cage of war, the possibilities are still limitless.

I had been hearing about the Yezidi people who live in villages near Dohuk. Followers of an ancient religion, whose proponents claim it is the oldest in the world, there are thought to be about a half million Yezidis, living mostly in the area of Mosul, with smaller bands in forgotten villages scattered across Northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and other lands. Saddam had labeled the Yezidis "Devil Worshippers," a claim I'd heard other Iraqis make, but no source offered substantiation. I wanted to know more.

Meanwhile, back at Press Think, Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review Daily, comments:

I don't think this is real tricky.
Obviously, the job of the reporter is to report what he sees in front of his eyes, whether it redounds to America's credit or not.

Reporters (in Iraq or anywhere else) have one responsibility, as John Kifner, probably the best reporter at the New York Times, explained it long ago: "Go. See. Come back. Tell."

That's really about it.

(Part four is here.)

(More on Mike Yon here - including links to his must-read coverage of the Iraqi elections.)