November 26, 2003

John Burns’ gritty picture of Iraq

The New York Times’ chief foreign correspondent, John Burns, has already won Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of the conflict in Bosnia and the depredations of the Taliban in Afghanistan and appears well on his way to winning another for his coverage of Iraq. Burns was in Baghdad before the bombing started and stayed there until early May as one of a handful of independent (i.e. not “embedded”) reporters and his coverage was exemplary. Burns recently returned to Baghdad and discussed the current situation there at length last night on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” This is a must-hear. Burns remains a clear-headed, non-ideological observer, and he has both good news and bad. Good: progress is being made in many areas and Iraqis overwhelmingly do not want an abrupt pullout of U.S. troops. Bad: the security situation is terrible and Iraq is a more dangerous place now than it was during the war. He doesn’t speculate on how it will all turn out, but provides much gritty detail on the challenge.

Posted by tbrown at 01:22 PM

One more important difference from Vietnam

Iraq isn’t Vietnam, as the administration’s backers continuously remind us. Heck, I’ve said it myself. But there are some similarities. And one of the most important is high-level bungling in D.C. In Vietnam, we had Lyndon Johnson and his arrogant secretary of defense, Robert McNamara (followed, of course, by Richard Nixon). In the current mess, we have George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his arrogant underlings and advisers, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, who are committing the same kinds of follies that turned our experience in Vietnam into a generational nightmare. But, says Joe Galloway, there's one difference between this bunch of bunglers and the previous ones: “http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/opinion/7341341.htm It took Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon nearly a decade to fail in Vietnam. Cheney and Rumsfeld could do it in Iraq in a year,” he writes. He may be right. They do seem incapable of learning.

Posted by tbrown at 01:20 PM