Letters to the Editor
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me?
I am only a housewife in San Jose, but I knew this was idiocy from the start. I had plenty of hushed conversations with people just like me -- in the grocery store, at school, on the softball field. I could never understand how I, the most average of citizens, could foresee exactly what would happen in Iraq when it seemed everyone else saw the emperor fully-clothed. It felt like a secret that our leadership and punditry class had gone mad, a secret that you could only discuss furtively, with like-minded individuals. How could those in charge be so oblivious to the consequences of what seemed so obviously like taking a bat to a hornet's nest?
I'm tired of hearing about those who got it wrong. Let's open the floodgates to those, like Al Gore and Barack Obama, who got it right.
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thank you for this article
Greg, I'm really glad that you're providing models of excellent reporting, and I hope other journalists are listening. Perhaps they can learn from these positive examples. It works for my college students.
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The other side of the story
While it's good to get some critic reports from the US other than the usual fascist holier-than-thou propaganda US people are used to, as an european (who during all his academic carreer was confronted with what we call 'critical thinking', never trust information fed to you, allways question the motive of the informant, and check your sources)I am particularly fond of stories by Iraqis themselves, which is the only way to really get the two sides of the stories. One of my favourite entries is this one : http://gorillasguides.com/2007/02/23/ahmed-qassim-hamza-and-mohammed-qassim-hamza/ .
It features some small details but that describe much more then 1000 pictures of words. The fact that americans are just resented (and let's face it thats what they probably are, especially with so many Blackwater employees roaming Irak) as rampaging stealing occupying mercenaries inside that allready brutal gang-rape story helped me understand way better what it must feel like to be an Iraqi.
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they handle these things better elsewhere.....
Anyone reading something other than American media twigged to the difficulties a long time earlier. British media: The Guardian, the Independent, hell even the right-wing Spectator (!) had big question marks about what was up. French, German media: full of doubt. Why do you think Canada never went to war? -- our media raised questions early on.
If you persist in reading nothing but The New York Times (on a good day), what do you expect?
You forgot Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks.
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You Missed A BIG One!
Where's Scott Thomas Beauchamp? This guy was a WAR HERO! Who spoke Truth to Power more than he?
So what if he lied and made it all up? It was compelling reading! Hasn't anyone heard of Fake But Accurate? C'mon, give credit where credit is due!
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Bloggers, Neil Young and Comedians
Wow. What next, Best Anti War Car Commercials of 2008?
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Neil Young But Not Dixie Chicks?
Or Green Day for that matter? (If you want to know the turning point of this war among the young (forget the college kids; I'm talking the real next generation, high school and below), it was "American Idiot."
And as for the Dixie Chicks: they made their voice heard and took their stand before the war, three years before Young (a one-time Reagan supporter, let's not forget; his politics have meandered over the years like John McCain's comprehension of geopolitics) and they actually paid a huge price for it - a price they pay to this day.
And since this is supposedly about war coverage, don't forget the entire McClatchey (nee Knight-Ridder) chain, or the foreign press from whom so many of us who get our news on the Internet rely.
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Obama out
Taking a stand against this war, Barack Obama risked his very candidacy for senate. That has not been clearly promoted by U.S. media. War reporters are also up against the networks' machine to satisfy their viewers' nationalist self-concept.
Other than PBS, no major media have dared to penetrate the old culture of "America is Right due to Might" since Vietnam. In the European and Asian press, Empire tactics are immediately seen as bullying, promoted to further the greedy capitalists in America that control world markets to a degree.
The entire point to the "underground" nature of web reporting and blogging is that we are a global enterprise now - these old dogs of war cannot bark without being questioned on their facts and context any longer. Not only are the named persons heroes of the highest order, they are harbingers of the world that refuse to accept lies/ignorant pap for good journalism.
In a sense, far wider than narrow nationalism can envision, the real sendup of this engagement with "terrorism" is an equally resounding confrontation of self-aggrandisement that has crippled the States since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution launched a war against communism in Vietnam.
It is The 60's once again... we pray that leaders will learn.
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some uncountable number of people in the city of Chicago
They were members of lefty groups like Stone Soup and the Catholic Workers House and certain churches and random other people, walking around with old fashioned print flyers and plain old talking to people.
Maybe there were more like-minded whisperers here or maybe the winter here was just colder, but you'd end up in a bar with the entire room of strangers talking together, swapping URLs of non-US news sources, organizing protests and keeping each other informed.
This homeless guy on my block had a sign on his shopping cart that said:
End the War. No More Dead Soldiers.
Reminding me that many of the homeless around here are veterans of another ill-advised war.
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Three more
Scott Ritter
Dilop Hiro
Mark Morford http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/01/10/notes011003.DTL&hw=morford&sn=464&sc=518
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/03/07/notes030703.DTL&hw=morford&sn=448&sc=502
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where is Hersh?
Don't forget Seymour Hersh, whose very intelligent and nuanced coverage in the New Yorker magazine was scarily prescient. It was a surreal experience--I'd read his articles, think "That's just so bad it goes beyond my worse fantasies, that just can't be true," and yet he was proved right again and again. He broke Abu Graib. He detailed--way before the Iraq war even started--how the Bush admin was basically manufacturing the intelligence to suit them. He wrote about renditions and black sites long before these were on anybody else's radar.
And Hersh has been doing this for 40 years. He is truly one of America's greatest journalists.
And I highly recommend his book "Chain of Command," which expands out some of the New Yorker pieces.