Iraq Pundit notes that the New York Times is still on its mission to eradicate any seeds of public confidence that might spring from the security crackdown in Baghdad.
Am I hypersensitive, or is that a minimizing, almost self-nullifying way to put it? Of course, in the NYT's world, even seemingly welcome news from Iraq isn't really good news at all. When the revolting Moktada Al Sadr went into hiding, for example, the Times saw it as an opportunity for somebody even worse to come along. When Iraqi and U.S. troops recently wiped out an army of fringe Shiite cultists, the Times saw the battle as a case of miscalculation by the Iraqi forces, because they called in U.S. backup. The whole of the cultist army was captured or killed, but what mattered to the NYT was that the Iraqi forces had supposedly miscalculated!
Now we have "a few families" who "are said to be returning" to "some areas closely patrolled by American troops." Yeah, well, one of those families is mine; I wrote about it here. I took pains in that post not to inflate the significance of my family's return to the home they had been forced to leave. Theirs was one Baghdadi household, I acknowledged, and I expressed the hope that the example would soon be multiplied many times over. But while I don't want to exaggerate the significance of their homecoming, I don't want to see it trivialized into something the Times treats as suspect hearsay, either.
Maybe this is a good time to pass along more such news, not to "refute" the Times' portrait of Baghdad as a city of fear (it's certainly that), but to demonstrate the chasm between the Times' approach to Iraq now, and Iraqis' view of our own troubled country.
Comments