Scott
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 24 May 2004
Posts: 1603
Location: Massachusetts
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 Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 8:01 pm Post subject: Know your enemy... |
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Here's a link to a blog post about an incredible story by Toby Harnden about an American print journalist in Iraq:
www.instapundit.com/archives/015545.php
Here's the remainder of the article, which wasn't quoted on instapundit, but still bears reading:
| Quote: | The moral degeneracy of these sentiments didn’t really hit me until later when I dined at the home of Abu Salah, a father of six who took over as the Daily Telegraph’s chief driver in Baghdad when his predecessor was killed a year ago. It was a — sadly — rare opportunity to speak to ordinary Iraqis in a social setting.
As the lights went out for the third time that evening, we discussed what life after Saddam was like. It was possible to talk freely now, said his sister Jenan, but the Americans had not yet brought either peace or democracy. Two months ago, the family had been forced to raise $40,000 for the release of her abducted brother-in-law.
She had decided not to apply for a job at the new American Embassy because of the dangers. ‘My friend worked as a translator for the Coalition,’ she said. ‘One night her car was ambushed by the resistance and they killed her with a bullet to the head.’ This week, a neighbour’s three-year-old daughter had been kidnapped. All Jenan longed for was stability.
Iraq is so dangerous now that hardly any television journalists venture out of the Al-Hamra or the Palestine Hotel, where lager and post-barbecue spliffs help relieve the tension of being in a war zone. There are insurance problems and the brooding, ex-SAS bodyguards forbid any excursions. The dirty little secret is that the endless ‘stand-ups’ you see on your screens are based on no reporting at all. Those of us who work for newspapers grow our Shia beards or, in the case of the women and the occasional John Simpson wannabe, wear hijabs and trust in fate, our relative anonymity and the skill and bravery of Abu Salah and his kind to get us to Najaf and Fallujah without being summarily executed. But what we can accomplish is limited.
Into this journalistic vacuum it is all too easy for the prejudices of the press corps — tourists looking through telescopes — to flow more freely than ever and the resulting reports to be distorted and incomplete. After the horrifying videotape slaughter of Nick Berg, there will be even greater reluctance among Westerners to leave their fortified hotels and compounds.
Whatever we thought about the war before it was launched, it is imperative that the forces of Arab nationalism and Islamism that now threaten to destroy Iraq are defeated. If America fails in Iraq it will be all of us in the West, not just Bush, who will suffer. But those who would be most in peril, of course, would be the Iraqis, who deserve better than to have their country treated as an electoral playground by the American Left or Right. To wish otherwise is as sick as the grins on the faces of the Abu Ghraib torturers. |
Harnden's failure to name the female journalist in question, I admit, leaves him open to sniping about "hearsay", but she must really be hoping that her name and the publication for which she works are never revealed!
I wonder who she's going to vote for in November?
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Bye bye, Boston Straggler! |
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