NYTimes: Iraqi troops eat well, spout ‘platitudes’
The fact there are thousands of Iraqis proud to defend their country from insurgents doesn’t fit the New York Times’ story arc for Iraq, of ‘quagmire’, ‘worsening situations’, and ‘increasing Sunni rage at the Americans’. So what should a NYT reporter do when a Sunni Iraqi soldier says he is “proud” to be in Falluja to “clean the terrorists out of our country”? Denigrate his contribution to the military effort? Portray him as a MRE-eating freeloader? Question, without basis, the sincerity of his statements? Or all of the above?
This tale begins with the Iraqi soldiers who sat in a circle, cross-legged, within the Great Mosque on Friday, wearing those same tan uniforms…
On this day, the soldiers were not doing much of anything except eating MRE’s, the American military’s “Meals – Ready to Eat.” In fact, they have done little if any fighting at all, but as a gesture to Muslim sensitivities are generally the first to enter each mosque as it is taken.
When approached and asked about themselves, the soldiers reflexively lapse into robotic platitudes. “I joined the Iraqi Army to clean the terrorists out of our country,” said a man who identified himself only as Muhammad, a Sunni Arab from Mosul. “I am proud to be doing this.”
Do you think there is any chance the Times would describe an opponent of the war in Iraq as “laps[ing] into robotic platitudes”?
November 15th, 2004 at 10:26 am
Boy, there’s nothing so good for troop morale as being called window-dressing to American aggression. Of course, disparaging people who are willing to sacrifice their life for something seems to be the favourite pastime of some lefties.
November 17th, 2004 at 6:39 am
The failure of thinking in the NYT piece concerns over-simplification of the facts. It isn’t true that all Sunnis (who benefited more than Shiites under Saddam) are against the Americans. At a guess, if there is a monolithic group that is happy about all of this, it would be the Kurds.
The larger issue — mentioned only in passing in this thread — that of “quagmire”, may overstate the daily situation in Iraq, but it does not overtate the potential for trouble across the Middle East. My position remains that if the U.S. is truly interested in Middle East peace (pacifying Iraq being the first step) then they’ll do far more in Bush’s second term to enlist more nations to the cause. 200,000 troops isn’t enough to impose a high enough level of safety to tip the balance toward things that citizens of free nations hold as givens: you know, the usual stuff like jobs and not being blown up.