Fly Located
… in ointment. WaPo gets the prize with today’s article, “I don’t think this place is worth another life.”
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 27, 2007; A01
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 Their line of tan Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles creeps through another Baghdad afternoon. At this pace, an excruciating slowness, they strain to see everything, hoping the next manhole cover, the next rusted barrel, does not hide another bomb. A few bullets pass overhead, but they don’t worry much about those.
“I hate this road,” someone says over the radio.
They stop, look around. The streets of Sadiyah are deserted again. To the right, power lines slump down into the dirt. To the left, what was a soccer field is now a pasture of trash, combusting and smoking in the sun. Packs of skinny wild dogs trot past walls painted with slogans of sectarian hate.
A bomb crater blocks one lane, so they cross to the other side, where houses are blackened by fire, shops crumbled into bricks. The remains of a car bomb serve as hideous public art. Sgt. Victor Alarcon’s Humvee rolls into a vast pool of knee-high brown sewage water — the soldiers call it Lake Havasu, after the Arizona spring-break party spot — that seeps in the doors of the vehicle and wets his boots.
“When we first got here, all the shops were open. There were women and children walking out on the street,” Alarcon said this week. “The women were in Western clothing. It was our favorite street to go down because of all the hot chicks.”
That was 14 long months ago, when the soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, arrived in southwestern Baghdad. It was before their partners in the Iraqi National Police became their enemies and before Shiite militiamen, aligned with the police, attempted to exterminate a neighborhood of middle-class Sunni families.
Next month, the U.S. soldiers will complete their tour in Iraq. Their experience in Sadiyah has left many of them deeply discouraged, by both the unabated hatred between rival sectarian fighters and the questionable will of the Iraqi government to work toward peaceful solutions.
Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice — 20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad — Alarcon said no: “I don’t think this place is worth another soldier’s life.”
While top U.S. commanders say the statistics of violence have registered a steep drop in Baghdad and elsewhere, the soldiers’ experience in Sadiyah shows that numbers alone do not describe the sense of aborted normalcy — the fear, the disrupted lives — that still hangs over the city.
A scan of that past month’s worth of WaPo contributions to Iraq reportage suggests WaPo has been primarily interested in the American-bashing hit of the month, an incident involving a security firm called Blackwater, and more recently the Turkish matter. A month’s Iraq war headlines suggests anything but actual coverage of Iraq. Then, there are the attention grabbers like the op-ed from the 12 captains. Help me out here. Anyone aware of the Post exhibiting any intense interest lately in the parts of Iraq where things appear to be working? Maybe I missed it.
Today’s sudden fascination with realities on the ground in Iraq seems to have been sparked by the death Oct. 14 of an Iraqi correspondent for the Post, Salih Saif Aldin. Fair enough. Or it would be if there was any evidence America’s premier news organizations had any interest in providing in-depth coverage of the war in Iraq, in attempting to understand what is happening there.
The plane that lands safely, not news. That’s the basic rule of journalism that prompts everyone to complain that newspapers are only full of bad news. No one would read newspapers full of safe landings. However, when planes start landing safely …
Evisceration by Gateway
Welcome Instapundit, Gateway, Meme, etal. Come on in. Bad news everywhere: Crusaders shattered, Byzantines crushed. It’s enough to make your mind melt. Got your peacetags? In other business, Carrot-top say “Ugh!” Whaddaya say we get dung-faced and sleepwalk naked?
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:43 am on Saturday, October 27, 2007
9 Responses to “Fly Located”
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October 27th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Wapo, Meet Michael Yon and start reporting the new
Recently we posted a piece on Michael Yon and what he calls the Bizarro world of reporting as he walked us through the differences between what is reported about Iraq and the realities on the ground which he risks his life to bring us, every day.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
[…] Jules Crittenden takes it a step further and actually looks through Wapo’s archives and finds: A scan of that past month’s worth of WaPo contributions to Iraq reportage suggests WaPo has been primarily interested in an incident involving some Blackwater security, more recently in Turkey. This sudden intense interest in realities on the ground seems to have been sparked by the death Oct. 14 of an Iraqi correspondent for the Post, Salih Saif Aldin. Fair enough. Or it would be if there was any evidence America’s premier news organizations had any interest in providing in-depth coverage of the war in Iraq, in attempting to understand what is happening there. […]
October 27th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Suddenly all the left bloggers act like they are milbloggers. Yon’s report on Beauchamp’s battalion confirms Paltrow’s reporting. Lt. Col. Glaze did not blue-sky the problems, so the quote from the segreant did not surprise me. They bust their asses to defeat Saddam and AQI and these monkeys in Sadiyah are settling old scores. WTF? I can see teh sergeant’s point. That said, the war looks won and maybe Petraeus can send in a division to sit on Sadiyah until the idiots give up. Like you said, pick the worst. I don’t think WaPO was filling any antiwar agenda. It supports the war on the editorial page. You go where the action is.
October 27th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
[…] The Washington Post story is here. Reactions from the left and right are here. One story has all the lefty blogs pretending they are milbloggers. It is to laugh. Jules Crittenden nailed it. […]
October 27th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Old scores always get settled after people like Saddam are gone.
But the truth is there are places in the United States where there are blocks of destroyed buildings and heavily armed young men running in gangs. But not all of America is like that.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
I could understand reporting what these men have experienced–they have experienced it and are a part of the story. But they are only a part of it all. Saying that there is progress means making a comparison, or what is it you are progressing from. These people do not consider their context to be the war, but their abstraction of the war. The progressives don’t understand how to gauge progress.
October 27th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Sadiyah’s Second Chance
The Washington Post, as Jules Crittenden wryly puts it, has located the fly in the Iraq ointment. He’s on to something. Important.
Less than two weeks after admitting on its front page that the Army and Marines have all but routed Sunni terrorists…
October 27th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Washington D.C. used to be a nice place. Not so much anymore. We should pull out of Washington D.C.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I pointed out to a friend earlier this week that Iraq is just emerging from a generation or two of where killing people was the business of the day. The Iraqis are slowly learning that they have a government, even if it as screwed right now, and that they slowly ratcheting back the violence.
It’s not all roses, of course, but 5 years ago, how many Iraqi citizens might have imagined the day when they could hope?
Baby steps, people. Baby steps.