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Five years on

By lex, on March 16th, 2008

The New York Times John Burns has a fair retrospective on our Mesopotamian adventure.

Update: Greyhawk spots a trend. Or several.

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March 16th, 2008 | Category: GWOT

5 comments to Five years on

  • Ron Snyder
    March 16, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    His article was very good. I’ve seen him in a number of interviews and am most impressed.

    Definitely on the top 5 list for people I trust re ME / Iraq reporting.

  • CG23 Sailor
    March 16, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    I keep coming back to one line…

    [BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.]

    “Thank you BBC for putting our pilots lives in danger.”

  • Nose
    March 16, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    Hell, their lives were in danger just by manning up those old rattletraps!

    Why would you expect a “News” source anywhere, but in particular in England to show any amount of restraint?

    Nose

  • Daveg
    March 17, 2008 at 3:23 am

    I have to say that I’m not quite as impressed by Mr. Burns essay.

    …Abu Ghraib, … Haditha all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the American armed forces.

    I lost no admiration at all for American armed forces, although I sure had nothing but contempt for the very few that exhibited their unworthiness to wear the uniform. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it seems that a pretty wide brush is being used here.

    But reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war…

    Their failure in the run-up to the war, in my opinion, was the least of the media’s culpability. Witness how quiet they are now that the good news is more common than the bad news that could be, and was, heralded as a group “we told you so” (except now, apparently, they didn’t) and served not only to sell papers and commercial time, but to turn opinion that had been in favor of resolving a long-standing situation in a strategically critical area into vociferous protest and loss of support, which could only serve the interests of our opponents.

    I will also never forgive or forget the rush to reveal national intellligence secrets by Mr. Burns employer, but that’s out of scope, I suppose. Indicative, though.

    It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam.

    I dunno, but that seems wide of the mark somehow. Stability, something they had under Saddam? That’s what they want? That reeks of “peace at any cost” to me. Has nothing good happened in Iraq that Mr. Burns could share with us? Nothing at all??

  • Ron Snyder
    March 17, 2008 at 3:36 am

    John Burns is one of the few people who know the region, and is also willing to say when he was wrong. Well worth the time in reading some of his work over the past 25 years on Africa, Russia and the Middle East.

    He is not a typical NYT flunkie with a liberal agenda.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Burns
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