Letters to the Editor
Retired Military Patriot
Published Letters: 2275 Editor's Choice: 11
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A transscript worth reading
[Read the article: A new low of mindlessness for our media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If I recommend that you read a transcript of Hugh Hewitt’s interview with John Burns of the NYT yesterday, most of you will not do it because of the interviewer. To me, John Burns who has spent 30 years in the Middle East has been an honest journalist who is not driven by politics or ideology. Here’s what he said to a question posed by Hewitt about whether we should have invaded:
HH: Asking, I’ve asked you this before, and I’ll ask it again to exit, knowing what we know now, would you have counseled the invasion to occur in ’03?
JB: Well, let me answer the question in a slightly different way. I think that people like myself, who were here before the overthrow of Saddam, were absolutely mesmerized, and I’m even inclined to say obsessed with one aspect of this society, and that was the terror that Saddam Hussein inflicted on his own people, and that I think we thought, I know I thought, that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would bring an end to that terror, and would bring hope for the first time in a generation to Iraqis. I think those of us who felt that should have studied harder, and tried to acquaint ourselves more with the history of this country, and realized that beneath the carapace of terror laid a deeply fractured, deeply dysfunctional society in which Sunni, Shiia and Kurds have been locked together, and held in some relative stability only by at the point of a gun. Had we known all that, had we fully weighed all of that, I think that we might have reckoned then that ghastly as the terror of Saddam Hussein was, there was something even more ghastly that could ensure. I personally am too close to this now to be able to make any kind of judgment about that, and I think the judgment will depend on events yet to unfold. But I think that journalists, we who file mostly for 24 hour deadlines, need to learn a lesson, and I’m talking about myself, as much as anybody else here, and that we need to think very carefully when we’re cast into situations like this, and we become the messengers, if you will, the tribunes of the Western world, to write more about those sorts of things, the fractured society that lay beneath that carapace of terror, than just the terror itself.
It is worth reading things that we don’t agree with because we can always learn something from someone who has had long-time, on-the-ground experience. I think it is worth your time to read this transcript.
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Transcript_Page.aspx?ContentGuid=5bdb3520-d829-4fdb-a2bc-6611d80faba4
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Slow, but steady progress Glenn, although "serious" still misused
[Read the article: A new low of mindlessness for our media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The following was posted in The New Yorker, Interesting Times yesterday:
“Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, of the Brookings Institution, fresh from an eight-day trip to Iraq, have an optimistic Op-Ed titled “A War We Just Might Win” in today’s New York Times. It raises more questions for me than it answers. Among them:
Who organized their schedule?
How much time did they spend in each place they visited (Baghdad, Ramadi, Mosul, Tal Afar)?
How many Iraqis did they speak with, and whom? Did they meet Iraqis without American officers present?
What could and couldn’t they independently confirm from their briefings by military sources? For example, how do they know that, in Mosul and Tal Afar, “the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside”?
Finally, what do they mean when they declare at the end, “There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008”? As of a few weeks ago, O’Hanlon advocated a partition of Iraq and Pollack was talking about containing the civil war within Iraq’s borders. Neither of them had much faith that the Administration’s strategy could succeed. Have they changed their minds? If so, what’s their political strategy for sustaining the surge into 2008?
O’Hanlon and Pollack have long been critics of the war. They are serious analysts and have nothing to gain by supporting the strategy of an Administration that they say has “lost essentially all credibility.” I don’t doubt that they believe what they saw and heard and wrote, and I’m certain that some of the gains they describe are real. I would like to know more about what they didn’t see and hear. At the heart of arguments over the war there has always been the question of what’s happening “on the ground.” It’s never been harder to find out than it is now, and in my experience, no news is generally bad news. Over the past four years, Iraq has humbled a lot of people. What’s missing from the Op-Ed is a necessary humility.
I’ll try to get some answers to my questions and report back to you.”