Anyone catch Meet the Press yesterday? Now I know I have no idea what it must be like to live in Iraq these days, but maybe the New York Times should stop sending its reporters there. What good are they doing? After explaining that the New York Times "has a huge operation" in Iraq, Dexter Filkins, a Times correspondant there, went on to describe the current mood in Iraq:
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, you spent the better part of two years in Iraq. What's your sense of how things are going?Compare that with Jim Miklaszewsk's description on the same show of a recent experience in Falluja:MR. DEXTER FILKINS: I think it's better. It feels better. I mean, you know, in the last four or five months, you've had two pretty significant events. One was the recapture of Fallujah, which had become a safe haven for the insurgents, and the other was the election, which I think gave a lot of Iraqis a sense that they were going to get their country back and they were going to be able to control its destiny. And I--just being on the streets there you can feel some of the anger having been drained away...So at the moment, things are feeling a little better.
Again, I'll go back to Fallujah, because I was just there for a couple of days last week. Nine thousand homes and buildings in Fallujah were destroyed when the Marines went in in November. There have been 32,000 claims against the government by homeowners and business owners. Of those 32,000 claims, only 2,400 have been paid off so far. And when you walk in and--let's say your house is worth $10,000. They will only give you 20 percent of the amount of your claim for now. It's because--and those funds are controlled by the Iraqi government. They're husbanding those funds for use in the future. And as I stood next to the line of those claimants, all you have to do is ask them what their complaint is, and within seconds, their rage surfaces, so badly at one point the cameraman said to me, "Mik, we're about to start a riot here. I think we'd better leave."Given what actually happened in Falluja (MSWord; PDF here), I'd say Mik's view is probably the more reliable. I pity the fool who reads the NYT for international news. But I pity even more the fool who braves Iraq's terror in order to bring us such shoddy journalism. Posted by Paul at April 18, 2005 05:28 PMAnd the current president of the temporary council, Sheik Khaled, admitted to me that the people in Fallujah are already growing impatient, and predicted it will take at least another year before reconstruction actually begins to take hold.
I haven't been following too closely lately, but I don't have the impression that Dexter Filkins is such a bad guy. But even if he is, it still seems a bit unfair to the NYT. After all, they have other reporters in the country doing good work. Is John Burns still kicking around Iraq? He's written some serious stuff, including stuff that can't have been comfortable for anyone in the Bush admin to read.
Posted by: Chris at April 18, 2005 09:21 PMWell, all that's true. But it's also true that you'll most likely find anything that is important buried three-quarters of the way through the story. I find that the NYT is uniquely bad when it comes to presenting the story in a reasonable way.
Posted by: Paul at April 19, 2005 08:05 AMYeah? Huh, I've been mostly closing my eyes and hoping that everything just works out. So that would explain why I haven't been reading the NYT's coverage very closely lately. Is Filkins's work typically lousy, then, or is this just one irritating remark that caught your eye?
Posted by: Chris at April 19, 2005 08:28 AMA quick LexisNexis search for articles during the Falluja offensive reveals no articles in the Times with both "Falluja" and "hospital" or both "Fallujah" and "hospital", despite the Iraqi Red Crescent's having arrived there and having then been refused into the city.
Also, there are just two articles meeting the search terms "Falluja"/"Fallujah" and "phosphorus" for that period. The first, DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH from Nov. 10, 2004, and entitled "U.S.-LED ASSAULT MARKS ADVANCES AGAINST FALLUJA" mentions nothing of the phosphorus rounds used by the US military in the text. The article is turned up because the caption that apparently accompanied the article's picture reads:
Photos: Marines tried to take cover after a phosphorus round, set off to help provide cover for tanks, rained down on the unit. No one was seriously hurt. (Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times)(pg. A1)The other article, by Filkins, has the following as the 12th paragraph (or 9th paragraph from the end):
The confusion was such that at one point, a tank fired a phosphorus round that rained down on the American troops, breaking into a hundred flaming pieces and burning backpacks and gear but not hurting anyone seriously.Those are the only two references to the use of phosphorus rounds that I can find in the Times during the offensive. Given what the war was supposedly fought over, and the evidence from Saddam's use of chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war that was continually adduced, wouldn't a good paper have drawn better attention to this? Posted by: Paul at April 19, 2005 09:38 AM
Before that lexis-citing comment I had posted a comment saying that I was willing to withdraw my generality given that I couldn't immediately back it up with supporting evidence. That comment didn't post. I just wanted to make clear that I don't take the evidence given above to demonstrate the generality. Though it is evidence for it nonetheless.
Posted by: Paul at April 19, 2005 09:52 AMYes, it is very nice supporting evidence, actually.
Posted by: Chris at April 19, 2005 10:18 AMAnd what's with your retraction not posting? That's awesome. My new non-retraction Movabletype plug-in must be working. Computers these days . . .
Posted by: Chris at April 19, 2005 10:19 AMheh..
Posted by: Paul at April 19, 2005 12:23 PMFilkins was also asked how one is able to do much reporting when one is so heavily guarded.He said he is unable to remain in one place for more than ten minutes or so before word gets out.Someone on the talk shows said a private security company provides escort service on the airport road (where the young american gal was just killed)cost one way 35000 dollars.
Posted by: Troutsky at April 19, 2005 06:45 PMSeems a pretty bogus point to me. The compensation claim center for fallujah is not the same place as the streets of baghdad, and so it is not surprising if they have different moods. Do you actually have any evidence that contradicts Filkin's point?
Also, phosphorus shell = flare. That's a chemical weapon in the same sense that a battery powered torch is.
soru
Posted by: soru at April 19, 2005 07:46 PMSoru, Filkins is a journalist. He knows the importance of being specific. He also knows that the people of Falluja--whether those thousands that left in anticipation of the siege, or those who stayed--are not happy with the that operation went down, and that they are furious with the slow pace at which reconstruction has moved. But he chose instead to cite the taking of Falluja as something that has, as he said, lessened the anger of Iraqis--and there is no evidence that anything that happened in Falluja has lessened Iraqis' anger. Filkins was making a point about "Iraqis", not certain Iraqis who live in Baghdad. My point is that Filkins's generalization was unlikely.
As for the phosphorus shells: do you typically have to "take cover" after you've turned on your flashlight? According to one report:
""Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.
Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted.""
It's hard to deny that these rounds burned skin when the Times did report that soldiers had to "take cover", and that the rounds burned their backpacks.
Posted by: Paul at April 20, 2005 08:29 AMhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_%28projectile%29
It seems I was slightly wrong, phosphorous is a smoke shell, not flare. Nevertheless, if it was supposed to be a super secret anti-personel weapon that melted skin, why were all the US soldiers hit basically uninjured? Seems a bit crap for a secret terror weapon.
soru
Posted by: soru at April 22, 2005 09:13 AMSoru,
I'm not sure about phosphorus. As it happens, I actually have seen phosphorous wounds before (as a teenager goofing around with homemade bombs - the less said about the incident the better). They ain't pretty. When phosphorous burns, it tends to stick to the skin and burn in - and it burns very, very hot. The smoke is very thick indeed, so it sounds right that it would be used as a smoke shell. But, if I recall, the fumes are sort of poisonous, aren't they?
At any rate, I could be just confused about this. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the U.S. military certainly did use napalm, which is not at all crap as a terror weapon, and which does raise certain questions of consistency.
Also, I hope you're not trying to deny that the U.S. did very probably commit war crimes in Fallujah during the relevant period. That's all Paul really needs to make his point, isn't it?
Posted by: Chris at April 22, 2005 10:17 AMThough, of course, if you're right about the phosophorous the point is also well-taken.
Posted by: Chris at April 22, 2005 10:19 AMWell yes, the mark 77 fuel gel bomb is not strictly napalm, but close enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb
On the main point, I would imagine the journalist's point was that the capture of Fallujah enabled the elections to take place safely, and the successful elections lead to an improvement of mood.
Arguable, but not something you can just state to be self-evidently wrong.
soru
Close enough indeed. Close enough for the U.S. military to call it napalm. Not close enough, apparently, for them to admit that they were using it when asked. Oy vey! Some days . . .
As for whether it's self-evidently wrong . . . I suppose very little is self-evident in the strict sense. But gosh, we're talking about a ruined town in the middle of the Sunni "triangle" in which . . . blah, blah, blah. I think a little snark may be in order.
Posted by: Chris at April 22, 2005 11:59 AMWrong snark is not good snark. You have to get onto the higher ground, and then drop the snark upon them.
And incidentally, when talking about Iraq, saying 'people died nastily' is not, in itself, proof you own the high ground. It's just a description of the nature of the territory being fought over.
soru
Posted by: soru at April 22, 2005 08:04 PMThat's not quite what I'm saying. Perhaps I'm just tired, but arguing about the whole thing from the start, once again, makes me feel weary. They turned fleeing civilians back into a war zone and then shot anything that moved. They don't seem to have been terribly indiscriminate in their use of force. They shut down hospitals to avoid bad publicity. They . . . aw forget it. I know that if we're starting from scratch in the argument, we need to show that these things were unjustifiable as well as bad. I just can't be bothered to start from scratch any more - or at least today. The whole thing is just too depressing. Snark was invented for times like this.
Posted by: Chris at April 22, 2005 08:19 PM