The Good News

I think this post by Larry Johnson, a former Fox News analyst (among other things), could be as important a post as I've read all year. When you scroll down story after story of executions, bombings, mortar attacks, kidnappings, oil pipeline attacks, you get a very real sense of how desperate the situation is over there. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of deaths every single week. There's no way to disassociate the situation in Iraq from the violence. Talking about "the good news" to the exclusion of this is simply absurd.

I hadn't seen this soundbite by Lara Logan of CBS News before, but it's instructive (and maybe I just like watching Lara Logan talk, just a little bit):

I mean, I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here.  That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded. 

...Our own editors back in New York are asking us the same things. They read the same comments.  You know, are there positive stories?  Can't you find them?  You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on?  Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack. 

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage.  And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked. I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country….So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?

They can't even show the reconstruction projects because if they do, they'll be blown up. How does that constitute progress? Furthermore, every time the US does anything to move the Iraqis toward reconciliation, like this week's visit by Secretary of State Rice to try and break the deadlock in creating a unity government, it ends up hurting more than helping. Not only can't we show you any good news in Iraq, we can't even try to fix this monster we created.

This is an impossible situation we've created. We've lost all credibility by bouncing back between factions in the country, by stealing billions allocated for reconstruction projects, by provoking the insurgency (whether through effective smear tactics or our own sins), by being seen as complicit in the violence that continues to define the country. If you want to wrangle some good news out of that, go ahead. But you won't be coming close to giving the whole picture of this tragedy.