The Washington Post’s Jonathan Finer writes a balanced opinion of the literally fly by night pundits who do a five-day choreographed PR tour to Iraq and then come back as experts.
This discussion came to a head with the fraudulent op-ed piece in the WSJ by two long time war supporters: Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon
A dizzying number of dignitaries have passed through Baghdad for high-level briefings. The Hill newspaper reported this month that 76 U.S. senators have traveled to Iraq during the war, 38 in the past 12 months. Most never left the Green Zone or other well-protected enclaves....Since leaving Iraq last year, I've been surprised by the impact these choreographed tours have had on domestic discourse about the war. First come opinion pieces full of bold pronouncements of "what I saw" at the front. Next, the recent returnees appear on late-night cable programs or the Sunday talk .
As if John McCain and Joe Lieberman didn’t look like utter fucking idiots walking around a market surrounded by helicopters and armed mercenaries and wearing flak jackets and helmets all the while whistling at what a cakewalk Iraq had become. Do they really think that anyone but hardcore Fox watchers would actually think- "hey honey, we actually DID liberate the Iraqis. I mean, if you have a flak jacket and a helmet and 100 armed guards and close air support, it’s a pretty good life over there."
The most frustrating such visit during my time in Iraq was that of radio host Laura Ingraham, who rarely, if ever, spent a moment outside the protection of U.S. forces or a night outside a military base. While in Baghdad in February 2006, she wrote on her Web site that the training of the Iraqi army "continues apace" and that "you wouldn't know it by reading the New York Times, but IED attacks are actually down since December." After returning, she continued criticizing Baghdad-based journalists -- almost all of whom operate without military protection -- telling an NBC audience that "to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off."
The following exchange demonstrates the hollow and rigidly top down messaging in a PR effort to tell us that Iraq is all hunky dory now. You might recall Lindsey Graham asking Jim Webb how many time she had been in Iraq, given that Graham had had about a dozen of these Disneyfied trips. Webb answered:
"I've been a member of the military when the senators come in," replied Webb, who has not visited Iraq but fought in Vietnam during a long military career. "You know, you go see the dog-and-pony shows."
You see why conservatives don’t get comedy? Because comedy is about irony. The irony of a pussy reservist who attends carefully staged Iraq tours telling an actual combat veteran about war. This sort of thing (irony) goes through conservative heads like a neutrino.
Lieberman has been on a bunch of the faux information gathering tours and has repeated that he sees "a dramatic turn round". He said his on a day when the Samarrah Mosque was bombed. But let's get back to the war supporters who now are war critiques and combat experts: O Hanlon and Pollack.
The Brookings pair, self-described in their Times op-ed as "two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," are also longtime backers of the invasion and the recent troop surge. Before the war Pollack wrote a book subtitled "The Case for Invading Iraq," and he has found fodder for hope on every visit.
It goes without saying that everyone can, and in this country should, have an opinion about the war, no matter how much time the person has spent in Iraq, if any. But having left a year ago, I've stopped pretending to those who ask that I have a keen sense of what it's like on the ground today. Similarly, those who pass quickly through the war zone should stop ascribing their epiphanies to what are largely ceremonial visits.
Uh...thank you for saying so.
And by the way, if you are strolling around in a flax vest, you are not safe.
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