The American Press in Iraq

I found a link to Eric Johnson's j'accuse of a specific reporter heading up the Washington Post Baghdad bureau on Instapundit and thought it was important enough to echo in my own blog. Johnson, a Marine Corps reservist who served in Iraq, and is also a writer, points out the fecklessness of this particular person, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and the tendentiousness of the, um, news stories being filed from that Baghdad bureau. I recognize that articles like this just reek of the post-Kaiser "stabbed in the back" bitterness found in Germany in the interwar years. But we didn't lose the war, we are winning it. And note that the article essentially validates what Paul Wolfowitz said (and later inexplicably apologized for).

With apologies to the shade of Harry Truman, I'm sick of babying the fifth-columnist press corps. Hurrah for Eric Johnson and the others like him. Unlike Chandrasekaran, Johnson knows (first hand) that we are fighting in a real war against terrorism. This is a war against an organized tenacious enemy that really exists, something that the Washington Post and the New York Times and many others don't seem to acknowledge. We are fighting terrorism in what ever form it takes, whether Al Qaeda or Baathists or al Sadr's Mahdi "Army". Nobody is asking the Post or the Times to be Pravda or Izvestia but for God's sake, at least TRY to be honest in your reporting. Make your point in the editorial pages. And to our political leaders, for God's sake stop apologizing to these people.