Journalists in Iraq

There's an excellent story running on NPR's Talk of the Nation today. Neal Conan (whose photo is to the right) is interviewing four journalists who have been covering Iraq since the beginning of this war: Anne Garrels, Ted Koppel, John Burns, and Hoda Abdel-Hamid. You really get a sense that they know what it's like there from the inside. Anne Garrels impressed me by saying that while the surge has worked, it hasn't improved things much for foreigners. She still operates by a 10-minute rule: she can't be on Iraqi streets in any one place for more than 10 minutes. If she were to stay longer, there's a good chance she'd be attacked or kidnapped. As I'm typing, Hoda Abdel-Hamid is saying it's actually the same situation for any journalist. One caller brought up the important point that while the surge may have been necessary, what has worked more is paying off insurgents like Al-Sadr. Ted Koppel talked about the discouragement setting in amongst troops right from the beginning of the war. The Army was expecting to be greeted, quite literally, by a band and people with flowers. Instead, they were met with RPGs. John Burns talks about how Iraq is such a secret society, partly thanks to Saddam Hussein, that even Iraqis see it as a "land of shadows." Americans, he says, have suffered from a lack of knowledge about Iraq, and in part this is caused by the secrecy that Iraqis had to maintain under Saddam. Hoda Abdel-Hamid talked about how Arabs have seen an entirely different war than Americans have. The American networks sanitize and glamorize the whole war. Ted Koppel agreed, and said he argued that the war ought to be covered more graphically. ABC wouldn't do it. With the elections, now, they say that the war is not going away, but it's taking a back seat in American newspapers and on television.