Transterrestrial Musings

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According to the Newseum, almost 80 reporters have
died in Iraq, this is a death rate 4 times that of
WW2.

Also, this person was in the Marsh areas which were pretty calm.
If she was in Anbar, it'd be a different story.

Posted by anonymous at September 13, 2006 10:41 AM

"It is difficult for myself and many others to have respect for western journalists in Iraq because they so very rarely committed themselves to actually going out and covering what was going on."

And why are they not "going out and covering what is going on"?

Maybe it's the lack of security?

Isn't that the issue?

Posted by Warren Kincaid at September 13, 2006 12:33 PM

No, the issue is that the "lack of security" isn't the only story in Iraq.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 13, 2006 12:35 PM

80 more journalists have paid the ultimate price
to get stories then you have Rand.
You think there are such wonderful stories
out there, fly out, spend a month and write
about how great things are going.

There is a wonderful hypocrisy about a men
sitting behind keyboards 5,000 miles from the
danger, complaining about men within artillery
range of the danger.

Posted by anonymous at September 13, 2006 12:40 PM

There is a wonderful hypocrisy about a men
sitting behind keyboards 5,000 miles from the
danger, complaining about men within artillery
range of the danger.

Yes, ignore the fact that the complaint is in fact coming from a woman who was there.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 13, 2006 12:54 PM

According to the Newseum, almost 80 reporters have died in Iraq, this is a death rate 4 times that of WW2.

If 4x the number of reporters have died in Iraq than died in WW2, how do the number of reporters COVERING Iraq compare to WW2?

For the last few years, the sheer number of reporters being allowed into the field to cover the story has always been reported as "unprecedented", meaning that there are more reporters in the field than in any previous war.

There were no satellite video phones in the field in WW2. There were very few, if any, "Take a reporter to work" days for the military in WW2.

You think there are such wonderful stories out there, fly out, spend a month and write about how great things are going.

There is a wonderful hypocrisy about a men (sic)sitting behind keyboards 5,000 miles from the danger, complaining about men within artillery range of the danger.

Yes, there is. It's even more wonderful that you illustrated your point from behind YOUR keyboard, 5,000 miles from the danger.

If you CHOOSE to go into harm's way (nobody is forcing these people into planes or train cars and dropping them off in Baghdad), and you claim to be a journalist, you have a responsibility to report all stories as you see them, objectively and truthfully. If you choose to ignore stories that make the US look good, you're not a real journalist, you're a propagandist. If you choose to make the trip 5,000 miles to get to Iraq, and then hole out in a cave because you're "too scared to go outside", then report your cowardice and get a plane ticket home.

I have sympathy for collateral damage casualties. The fact of the matter is, you're not really collateral damage if you weren't there when it started. You can't and shouldn't go into harm's way with the expectation that you have a 100% chance of living through it. Our volunteer armed forces realise this, so how is that any different from someone who volunteers to take a camera and notepad and fly over there? It's not exactly the Easter Egg Hunt on the White House lawn over there...

Shame on me for bothering to reply to an anonymous troll...

Posted by John Breen III at September 13, 2006 01:01 PM

Yes, it's always amusing when anonymous trolls accuse others of cowardice.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 13, 2006 01:14 PM

the issue is that the "lack of security" isn't the only story in Iraq

Yes it is. Hospitals, schools, power lines aren't stories - they "stuff".

Stories are what people pay media companies to report, remember media is a business.

Car bombs, loss of basic human rights for women, kidnaps, murders, torture.

They're stories. Its the nature of a media.

If you want to report other stuff, set up your own system and report it. I suspect you'll get limited interest from the mass market though...

.... oh, right, you do. Fine. Move along then, nothing to see here...

Posted by Dave at September 13, 2006 01:18 PM

"No, the issue is that the "lack of security" isn't the only story in Iraq."

But it is the story that trumps ALL OTHER stories. Lack of security means that the schools, hospitals, roads, etc. often cannot be built, or are built and destroyed, or are built at very high cost because of the need to protect the workers. Just look at how all the US reconstruction aid has been swallowed up by security concerns. Instead of buying concrete and gravel and nails to build stuff, it goes for security. All this "the reporters are not covering the good things in Iraq" is bizarre, because everything in Iraq hinges upon the fact that it is not secure three and a half years after the invasion. That's the story.

Posted by Warren Kincaid at September 13, 2006 01:28 PM

No, the story is that a lot of good things are happening in Iraq despite the lack of security, and going unreported.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 13, 2006 01:33 PM

Question: How many of these 80 "journalists" were Iraqi stringers? IIRC, Saddam ensured that the English speakers were Sunnis. Wouldn't that suggest that Western "news" organizations that hired them weren't hiring journalists, as we Westerners think of them?

Posted by MG at September 13, 2006 02:30 PM

The newseum journalist memorial is at
http://www.newseum.org/scripts/journalist/main.htm

Feel free to slander the dead.

Posted by anonymous at September 13, 2006 04:43 PM

I've said this before in here, on several occasions.

My younger son was in Iraq, with a Marine Combat Engineer group. He told me, as did his brother-in-law, a fellow Marine ho has been there twice, that the news we see is NOTHING like whats really going on. We don't see or hear any of the good work that happens. We don't hear about hospitals, schools, roads, or hospitals that are rebuilt.

Our MSM is misreporting the news from here at home everyday. They are slaughtering the news from Iraq and Afghanistan. Who is surprised at any of their lies? Why does anyone believe anything they say?

Posted by Steve at September 13, 2006 04:55 PM

Feel free to slander the dead.

Another low blow from an anonymous coward.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 13, 2006 04:56 PM

The newseum journalist memorial is at
http://www.newseum.org/scripts/journalist/main.htm

Feel free to slander the dead.

Not as freely as you seem to want to parade them out for your own cause.

Now, I'm sure that it's probably just an oversight, but even though there are 8 pages of "journalists who have died in Iraq", and the 8th page only has 4 names on it, there's still 17 people on the "preliminary list for 2006". Add them to the 74 that are already listed for Iraw, and you'd get 91. If you truly thought to "honor the dead", why not honor all 91, instead of "almost 80"? Especially since there are 2 Americans amongst this year's dead. I submit that it is YOU who sully their memories, not any of us, given that you can't be bothered to fully research the site that you hang your entire argument on.

Further, the VAST majority of the reporters listed as dying in Iraq are FROM Iraq to begin with, or from the UAE. None of these reporters are writing anything that will ever pass in front of the eyes of an American. None of these native Iraqis "flew 5,000 miles to bring us the news." In fact, from some of the details about some of those killed, most of them appeared to be random innocent victims who also happened to be a journalist.

The data about whether a reporter was killed "in the line of duty", in a mass bombing (it appears that 10-20% of those jounralists killed in Iraq were part of the 100+ people that were killed on Feb 1, 2004 in twin bombings), by friendly fire, or of natural causes (such as David Bloom, who died from a pulmonary embolism) are all buried within the details of the individual names. The site lets people "browse" by location of death, country of origin, year of death, etc, but has very little transparent data to read in any sort of aggregate form.

To ignore the 17 journalists that died in Iraq this year (especially the Americans), and to parade the other 74 journalists out to further your own cause, and to claim that they ALL have died In Iraq as a DIRECT result of the fighting over there is beyond reproach.

I submit that YOU are slandering the memories of the dead more than anyone else who has posted anything in this comment section thus far, Anonymous.

Posted by John Breen III at September 13, 2006 05:18 PM

"Feel free to slander the dead."

Feel free to dance in their blood for your own agenda Coward.

Posted by Mike Puckett at September 13, 2006 06:55 PM

So, out of a rather morbid sense of curiousity Rand, would, for example, say that life for women in the new Iraq is on average better than worse than it was under Saddam?

I'm interested in what your view of that MSM shril Riverbend is.

Posted by Daveon at September 15, 2006 03:28 AM

MG wanted to make some case that only sunni arabs
learned english, and that these must be sunni
stringers and that's why the reporting is so biased.
It seemed contemptible to slander the memory of people
who died doing their jobs. I merely pointed MG at
the best source for the list of dead reporters in Iraq.
That way he could slander them with some precision.
He obviously has chosen not to do that. It may speak
well that he reconsidered that idea.

As for the difference between 74 to 91 reporters killed
in iraq, i was using the list for those who were listed
by country, i didn't realize the 2006 list isn't integrated
into the country list. Almost 80 is a reasonably correct
term, althought for some reason John breen feels
it's a huge slight to the reporters.

I'm not sure where he gets the idea that none or few of
the reporters who died in iraq didn't die as a result of
the war. Hey conservatives get strange ideas.
Like Saddam is partnered with Bin Laden. That
and Saddam was responsible for 9-11.

meanwhile, I still invite simberg to spend a month in
Iraq writing feel good stories. He can embed himself
with a unit in say Ramadi or Fallujah, and tell all
the great stories live from Iraq. Air Fare is cheap,
he just rotated off of his contract with NGC,
Be a mensch simberg, go to Iraq.
Tell stories that professional reporters won't tell.

Posted by anonymous at September 15, 2006 10:34 AM

Hey, be a mensch, anonymous moron. Attach your real name to the idiotic and discredited chickenhawk argument.

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 15, 2006 10:47 AM

Simberg,

I'm not asking you to enlist, carry a gun or fight any battles,
just go find some of the feel good stories in Iraq.

Or is it only biting commentary from 5000 miles away.

Think of it as a working vacation.

Posted by anonymous at September 15, 2006 03:35 PM

Anonymous Moron, who continues to idiotically parrot the Chickenhawk fallacy. What part of "I am reporting an observation by someone who is risking her life on the ground in Iraq" do you not understand?

Posted by Rand Simberg at September 15, 2006 03:48 PM

Rand,

Is there anyway you could ban anonymous posting?

If it is worth posting, it is worth attaching your name to.

Posted by Mike Puckett at September 15, 2006 08:08 PM

Simberg

You seem to denigrate the work of reporters who
have died in Iraq because they don't report the
stories you believe to be true. You parrot the words
of one person and use it to slander the work of people
who died doing their jobs.
If you want some credibility just go over see with
your own eyes the good news stories and write
about them.

Posted by anonymous at September 16, 2006 10:02 PM

Anonymous Coward,

Rand has credibility whether you like it or not. You, on the other hand, have none on this site. You, on the other hand, are rightly seen for the hypocrite you are.

Posted by Mike Puckett at September 17, 2006 08:00 AM

Mistakes Were Made
How L. Paul Bremer's occupation paved the way for today's chaos in Baghdad.
Reviewed by Moises Naim
Sunday, September 17, 2006; BW07
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY
Inside Iraq's Green Zone
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Knopf. 320 pp. $25.95

When President Bush announced in May 2003 that he was appointing L. Paul Bremer as the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, I received an e-mail from one of his former business colleagues: "I just heard that Jerry [Bremer's nickname] will be running Iraq. And the Iraqis thought that the worst we could do was to bomb them."

At the time, I just smiled and dismissed the message. Three years later, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's extraordinary book made me realize how tragically prescient that e-mail had been. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is full of jaw-dropping tales of the myriad large and small ways in which Bremer and his team poured fuel into the lethal cauldron that is today's Iraq. He was not alone and had many eager and powerful partners in Washington, Baghdad and elsewhere. Still, by reporting on daily life and decision making inside the Green Zone, the cloistered compound that housed Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Chandrasekaran shows how incomplete our conventional wisdom is about what went wrong in Iraq.

That common wisdom holds that while the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein is still open to debate, American mismanagement of the country after the invasion is not. Even the Bush administration's staunchest supporters now accept that "mistakes were made" and admit that, for example, dismantling the Iraqi army and driving out officials tied to the old dictatorship's Baath Party (both policies that Bremer championed) were bad ideas. But often implicit in this dominant interpretation is a complacent understanding, even a justification, of U.S. mistakes made during the occupation. After all, goes the thinking, ethnic divisions, suicidal Islamist fanatics, decades of oppression and decay, and all sorts of other obstacles conspired against the success of the bold American enterprise.

It is hard to hold that view after reading this book. Chandrasekaran, now an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, was The Post's Baghdad bureau chief in 2003-04 and has a keen eye for the small detail that illuminates larger truths. He clearly suggests that the self-inflicted wounds created by CPA ineptitude, arrogance and ignorance were far from inevitable. Nor, he shows, were they minor causes of the mess the United States faces today in Iraq. Imperial Life in the Emerald City documents the way that an avalanche of unjustifiable mistakes transformed a difficult mission into an impossible one.

Take, for example, the story of Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a Navy reserve officer and physician with two Bronze Stars whom a colleague describes as "the single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government." Burkle was ousted a week after Baghdad's liberation because, he was told by his superiors, the White House preferred to have a Bush "loyalist" in charge of health matters in Iraq. Burkle was replaced (fully two months later) by James K. Haveman Jr., a social worker whose experience as the community-health director for Michigan's former Republican governor, John Engler, had followed a stint running "a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions." Haveman had also traveled widely "in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world." (That pro-life stance was not uncommon in the CPA: Two staffers report being asked during their job interviews if they supported the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling.) Chandrasekaran's rendition of Haveman's performance in Iraq makes for unnerving reading: the launch of an antismoking campaign while hospitals lacked pain killers; the emphasis on preventive medicine in a country ravaged by a bloody insurgency; an attempt to refashion Iraq's health care system with a U.S.-inspired model based on private providers, co-payments and primary care while newborns routinely died for lack of incubators.

Or take the case of Capt. John Smathers, a res-ervist and personal injury lawyer charged with bringing some order to the chaotic traffic jams that ensued after U.S. authorities eliminated all import duties and the country was flooded by imported used cars. The solution? Download Maryland's motor-vehicle code from the Internet, translate it into Arabic and, after much haggling and revision, have Bremer sign it into law. CPA Order 86 included provisions such as, "Pedestrians walking during darkness or cloudy weather shall wear light or reflective clothing."

Posted by George Preckell at September 17, 2006 12:45 PM

When so much money is combined with organizational chaos, a state of emergency and the expectation that powerful friends in Washington would provide any needed cover, corruption is inevitable. Sure enough, Chandrasekaran offers tales of corruption among American contractors that read like dispatches from a kleptocratic banana republic.

Readers should avoid the temptation to dismiss Imperial Life in the Emerald City as yet another book documenting America's misadventures in Iraq. That of course it is, but the book offers more than a dispatch from the trenches. Chandrasekaran does not set out to score partisan points or unveil large geopolitical lessons; he is, essentially, a reporter telling readers what he saw. Yet it is impossible to read his book without thinking about the larger implications of the story he tells.

What caused the massive collapse of common sense that doomed the CPA and undermined the U.S. gamble in Iraq? That is the question that every page tacitly forces on the reader. American ingenuity, pragmatism and practical approaches to problem-solving are legendary. But Chandrasekaran shows that what reigned in Iraq was massive incompetence, patently unfeasible schemes, naive expectations and arrogance fueled by ignorance. His book methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis. Nor are the book's complaints Monday-morning quarterbacking. The CPA's failings caused widespread grumbling at the time. Chandrasekaran tells of a message board on which some Marines had drawn a gravestone inscribed with the words "COMMON SENSE." The caption underneath it read: "Killed by the CPA."

Why? What happened? Chandrasekaran does not try to answer these questions directly. But his indispensable book offers powerful hints as to what the likely answers are. Bremer's regency suffered from too much unaccountable political power, too much carelessly spent money and too many ideological certitudes. Those conditions allowed incompetence, petty partisanship, patronage, nepotism and corruption to thrive. That is why "mistakes were made" -- and Chandrasekaran gets us away from that passive-voice formulation to show who, precisely, made them. Those mistakes go a long way toward explaining why success in Iraq is proving so tragically elusive.

Posted by at September 17, 2006 12:47 PM

I'm not entirely certain how showing displeasure with the preponderance of negative sensational coverage in Iraq so far has anything to do with dead journalists. I'm certain the contracting civilians that are over there could all whine about possibly being burned to death and trampled through the streets. That doesn't stop them from waking up the next day and getting the job done either.

Posted by Josh Reiter at September 17, 2006 11:14 PM

Mr. Haveman disputes the representations made by Mr. Chandrasekaran in his Washington Post article and his book. Chandrasekaran reported several inaccuracies. The Post has refused to print a response correcting the errors. The facts are available at www.havemangroup.com.

Posted by Scott Walker at October 1, 2006 03:20 PM

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