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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (6205)	9/12/2002 3:18:59 PM
From: orkrious	Respond to of 89467

greenie's legacy Message 17983840

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (6205)	9/12/2002 7:09:59 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Why Aren't U.S. Journalists Reporting From Iraq? If They'd Go, They Know Why Cheney's Claim Of A Saddam-Al Qaeda Axis Is Absurd tompaine.com Nina Burleigh has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War. This week we are finally getting to the core excuse from the Bush administration for attacking Iraq right now. Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with CNN’s John King Sunday, laid it out nice and simple, they way they like it back in Wyoming: "We have to worry about the possible marriage, if you will, of a rogue state like Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda." This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: There’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening. As long as the Condis and Cheneys are talking to journalists with no experience inside Iraq, they won’t get a raised eyebrow about this notion that the secular dictator is in bed with the jihadis -- even though there have been reprinted reports by Washington Post writers in the International Herald Tribune that the CIA has found no link between the Iraqi dictator and Al Qaeda. Why aren't more American journalists reporting from Baghdad? Admittedly, Iraq is a difficult place to cover. First there are the logistical problems. You can’t get a visa very easily and you can’t just fly into Baghdad. You have to spend fourteen hours sitting in a car, driving across the barren crust of earth that covers all those billions of barrels of oil Cheney and Co. are really interested in. Once inside Baghdad, you are assigned a "minder" -- a sometimes very creepy member of the Iraqi government apparatus who is going to eavesdrop on everything you say and terrify any average person you happen to meet. Thus, the reporting from Baghdad is usually very slight. Tom Brokaw, back in April, intrepidly got himself inside Baghdad. He reported from an open market -- as so many reporters have in the past 10 years -- to say it looked like Iraqis had ample food supplies. This visual assay is contrary to UN claims, but it’s an easy one to make. Look, there are some piles of food and there are some people. Cut back to New York. Print reporters, with more time and column inches, aren’t doing much better. Larry Kaplow, Cox Washington Bureau, got inside this summer. Here’s what he reported: Iraqis, as deprived as they are, still get ice cream! Kaplow stood in line with average Iraqis lined up outside a stand in the steaming summer heat buying their pathetic cones of frozen ice drizzled with day-glo sweetener. See, these Iraqis still have a sweet tooth, years after the sanctions! And that was that. The best of American reporters don’t seem to give a hoot about getting inside the country and looking around. Take the latest from ABC prime time. Producer Chris Vlasto spent months in an "unnamed middle eastern country" working his sources to get an interview for Claire Shipman with an alleged mistress of Saddam’s, just so we can learn this week that the freak uses Viagra and likes to watch torture videos of his enemies. I’ve been to Iraq three times since the Gulf War and no, it’s not easy to get inside or get real interviews. But it can be done. American peace activists are going every month, walking the streets freely. Anyone who spends a little time in Baghdad knows there is one thing the dwindling, beaten-down middle class of that country fears more than the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein: an Islamic uprising. The Iraqis sent millions of young men to their deaths in the 1980s fighting exactly the kind of fundamentalist Islam mentality that we so dread now. As much as they hate their dictator, Iraqis hate the Islamists even more. As a Sunni Muslim, so does Saddam. As in the 1980s, this creepy strongman is standing between Iraqis and the jihad. This observation is not difficult to come by. All it takes is a little time and little guts. Any journalist who spends a few weeks on the ground in Baghdad will start to hear this talk. People -- women especially, who have more rights in Iraq than any other Arab country -- are terrified of the jihadis in Iraq, even more than they are terrified of their dictator with his creepy Big Brother pictures staring at them from every crack and crevice of their wasted, wilted country. The trouble is, the journalists with the guts and means to go in country aren’t doing their job. Maybe they’ll all try to get visas when the bombing begins, and report from the Rasheed Hotel at the point when informing Americans will mean snagging footage of dead civilians -- instead of asking Cheney why isn’t he more worried about nukes in Pakistan -- where the jihadis are actually in the army and intelligence?