Letters to the Editor
rkr327
Published Letters: 43 Editor's Choice: 5
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In Defense of John Burns
[Read the article: The ongoing journalistic scandal at the New York Times]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn,
I am would like to speak in defense of John Burns. I have seen and listened to Burns reporting on Iraq for quite some time now, both in print and on the air. He has appeared frequently on both the News Hour and with Charlie Rose. I have always seen him to be fair, and anything but an uncritical shill for the administration. He will give the administration’s case, but will then present contradictory evidence, and I have seen him do this consistently. He strikes me as an old fashioned reporter, doing his job with skill, rigor and integrity. For example, the article from the July 10 NY Times ‘Week in Review' article you reference is entitled ‘Showcase and Chimera in the Desert. [Emphasis added].
Shortly after the ‘thumbs up’ bit you highlight I found:
In a speech 10 days ago to the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., President Bush cited the turnaround here and elsewhere in Anbar Province, a vast desert hinterland that accounts for nearly a third of Iraq, as a reason to resist demands from Democrats in Congress for an early withdrawal of United States troops. But Mr. Bush’s pitch masked some of the crucial questions that still confront American commanders.
Two factors that have led to the astonishing success in Anbar — the Sunnis’ dominance of the province and the nature of their foe here — could have the opposite effect elsewhere, especially in Baghdad. There the population is an explosive mix of sects, rather than largely Sunni. And the Sunnis’ fight — explicitly so, in the case of many of the new volunteers — is not just against Al Qaeda-linked extremists, but ultimately against the American presence here, and beyond the Americans, the new power of the majority Shiites.
That would meet my test, not simply for ‘fair and balanced’, but for careful and insightful reporting.
Further down we find these paragraphs:
Ramadi, which lies on the edge of a desert that reaches west from the city to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, had a population of 400,000 in Saddam Hussein’s time. That was before the insurgents — a patchwork of Al Qaeda-linked militants, die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party and other resistance groups fighting to oust American forces from Iraq — coalesced in a terror campaign that turned much of the city into a ghost town, and much of Anbar into a cauldron for American troops. Last year, a leaked Marine intelligence report conceded that the war in Anbar was effectively lost, and that it was on course to becoming the seat of the Islamic militants’ plans to establish a new caliphate in Iraq.
The key to turning that around was the shift in allegiance by tribal sheiks. But the sheiks turned only after a prolonged offensive by American and Iraqi forces, starting in November, that put Al Qaeda groups on the run, in Ramadi and elsewhere across western Anbar.
Not for the first time, the Americans learned a basic lesson of warfare here: that Iraqis, bludgeoned for 24 years by Saddam Hussein’s terror, are wary of rising against any force, however brutal, until it is in retreat. In Anbar, Sunni extremists were the dominant force, with near-total popular support or acquiescence, until the offensive broke their power.
Followed a short while on by:
But the change that made all the others possible, American officers say, was the alliance with the sheiks. In Ramadi, 23 tribal leaders approached the Americans and offered to fight the extremists by forming “provincial security battalions,” neighborhood police auxiliaries, and by sending volunteers to the Iraqi Army and police. Across Anbar, the 3,500 policemen in October jumped to 21,500 by June. In Ramadi, where there were fewer than 100 policemen last year, there are now 3,500.
Many recruits, American officers acknowledge, were previously insurgents. “There’s a lot of guys wearing blue shirts out there who were shooting at us last year,” Colonel Charlton said.
The trend has spread to other areas where American and Iraqi troops are fighting extremists, including the Sunni district of Amariya in Baghdad, where former insurgents have been given arms and ammunition to fight Al Qaeda-linked groups. Other areas are in Diyala Province, parts of the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad in Babil Province, and parts of Salahuddin and Nineveh, provinces with large Sunni populations north of Baghdad.
In an interview last week, the overall American commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, described the eagerness of at least some Sunnis in each of the five provinces to fight against Sunni extremists as the “most significant” development in his five months as commander. “Local security is helped incalculably by local support and local involvement, and that’s what’s happened,” he said.
Neither simplistic nor one sided.
The situation with the tribes and the sheiks is a complex one, and I have seen few presentations that even begin to sketch it in, as Burn’s attempts to do in this piece.
I have, from early on in this business, supported the idea of at least exploring using the tribes and the Sheiks in Iraq. It is well known that Saddam himself, after the first Gulf War, specifically made pacts with the Sunni tribes to bolster his position, and serve as a check on the Shia. It is likely that the Iraqi tribes, both Sunni and Shia, constituted the most effective source of social cohesion in Iraq as Saddam’s regime devolved towards terminal incompetence and criminal rapine.