Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Over there I don't want to write these words. Not long ago I received some surprising news about an old friend. Not a close friend by any means, but someone I have known for a number of years, run into occasionally, and have always regarded favorably. I learned from a mutual acquaintance that my friend, though not a professional journalist, had sought and obtained press credentials from a small newspaper, paid her own way to Iraq, and become “embedded,” as the jargon has it, with American forces there for a period of several months. My first reaction was one of admiration for the initiative and personal courage that it must have required for this woman, who has always struck me as a fairly quiet and not particularly adventurous person, to have done this. But when I later began to read accounts of her experiences I came to the conclusion that, whatever her original intentions, my friend had allowed herself to be used, that she was a prime example of why the practice of “embedding” is so attractive to military and political leaders and so detrimental to an honest and independent press. As she bonded with the soldiers who were her guides and companions, she appears to have swallowed uncritically everything she was told. She spoke of the “good work” the soldiers were doing, tabulated the “good news” she saw taking place before her. She was quoted, in a website run by the US army, to the effect that ”the media” were not giving the true picture of the situation, that they were letting ”the bad news take center stage.” (In Iraq, there has been no shortage of bad news available for that purpose.) Her comments have since been widely repeated on the internet and used as evidence, notably on a forum sponsored by one of the most noxious right-wing television polemicists, that the “liberal” press have given a distorted picture of the true situation. A situation that is in truth is actually just dandy. I have not been to Iraq. I am entirely lacking in the qualities that enabled my friend to interrupt her life and subject herself to months of danger and discomfort in the interests of a first-hand look at the situation there. But like every other citizen, I have the right to think for myself, to draw my own conclusions, based on whatever intelligence I can gain from the sources that are available to me, including the work of other, more experienced journalists, about the consequences that have ensued from the Bush administration's decision to invade. It is clear to me that our occupation of Iraq has been a total disaster, and that no pieties about the importance of “supporting the troops” can conceal the fact that our presence there has been grounded from the outset in a series of lies, and that it has turned Iraq, a nation that has suffered so much for so long, into a slaughterhouse. Every conclusion, every prediction, that advocates of the invasion have made, has turned out to be wrong; everything that critics of the war have warned about has come to pass, save one thing, which may yet be on the horizon: an internationalization of the conflict that would draw the forces of Iraq's neighbors into a catastrophic Gulf war. I believe that no good will ever come of our involvement in Iraq, that every day we remain in that country only amounts to a death sentence for one or more of the soldiers of whom my friend speaks so highly, not to mention the terrible costs to the Iraqi people, who now live in a country that is increasingly indistinguishable from Hell. I don't doubt my friend's sincerity or her good faith. I don't believe that she went to Iraq to be an apologist for the criminal politicians who are responsible for the nightmare in that country, but in the end that is exactly what she wound up doing. And it's something I don't think I'm going to be able to forget. February 3, 2007 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me