The Global Affairs Desk in North Beach
By Matt McFetridge

Are we getting the big picture from Iraq?
by Matt McFetridgeThe only time we get on the air is when we get in the middle of a firefight, lamented a veteran Baghdad cameraman. “We were at a firebase in Sadr City [Baghdad’s Shiite slum and home to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia] and took RPG [rocket-propelled grenades] and well-placed small arms fire. I was with a young correspondent who did really well, who even did a piece to camera while Americans were returning fire. It was all over in about 15 minutes, but it was good TV.”

Good TV is all that the suits in New York care about these days. I figured with the presidential slugfest in its infancy, more Iraq stories would be on Page 1 and leading newscasts. Nope. Many Iraq War critics grudgingly agree the troop surge is working, but is it?

American casualties are down. Iraqi civilian deaths are down. But, the surge isn’t as positive as the White House and Pentagon would like you to believe. The surge has separated Iraqis two largest tribes – the Sunni and the Shiites – behind blast walls and cosentina wire. Apartheid enforced by Uncle Sam. Sunni leaders have realized they will be left out of a future Iraq already firmly in the hands of the Shiites. Why fight the Americans now when we (the Sunni) will fight the Shiites when the Americans leave? The U.S. spends $12 billion a month, more than 4,100 American boys and girls are dead, and more than 30,000 are maimed or injured. I spoke on background with a couple correspondents who’ve spent a lot of time in the theater. I started with the usual question of why Iraq isn’t dominating the news cycle.

People are tired of hearing about Iraq because it all seems to be the same old thing. And with the casualty numbers down, people may think it’s good news, which of course it’s not. And the suits are interested in giving the viewers what they think the viewers want – Britney Spears instead of Basra.  

I think I caught another correspondent during happy hour:

No one cares. When it became really obvious that this was going to be a bad idea, everyone who said so before the war quit being interested … content that they were right, and those who supported the war don’t want to be reminded how shamelessly they were duped and lied to by an administration, which has the same moral authority as Adolph Hitler at a bar mitzvah.

I asked both scribes if they thought the U.S. media was losing its perspective.

The economy, of course, matters to people most – what they don’t seem to get is the connection between the war in Iraq and the economy. And of course Iraq doesn’t have much direct impact on many Americans because it’s not their sons and daughters fighting, it’s someone low down on the socioeconomic scale living in a neighborhood ‘way over there’ who has children in the theater. Not enough of the media has done ‘follow the money’ stories, which are actually the ones that would help explain to Americans why this war matters, in addition to the casualties. The U.S. media losing perspective? That’s a very broad question that’s complicated. Partially yes, because we’re obviously not coming up with stories which would make the war relevant to Americans. We’re not explaining the story, so people aren’t getting it. It’s immensely complicated – oil, Shiite, Sunni, Iranian control and influence, regional implications, ghettoization of Iraq [aforementioned apartheid], billions spent, political interests and the blame game, etc., etc. Very few journalists actually do a good job of explaining it.
The other correspondent was probably on his umpteenth martini:

The economy is in the s---ter, and the dollar too, because you can’t keep s---ting a billion bucks every three days, and have tax cuts and then expect to have money left over for silly things like schools and hospitals. Why hasn’t anyone done the math? Did the U.S. media ever have perspective? The moment Fox [News] came along and started waving the flag and did well, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. God bless the late Peter Jennings for giving those reporters who were wearing flag pins a bollocking.

There is no argument that American TV viewers got sick of seeing their boys die every night in Vietnam, and that TV coverage of the war had a role in it ending. I asked both correspondents what has happened since then.

We believed our own B.S. It’ll be easy … Gulf War One, the apparent ease of rolling over the Taliban in Afghanistan [now there’s another story] and everyone thought, ‘Hey why not take this army out for a spin, let’s see what it can do.’ And what Bush/Cheney have done is destroyed not only moral authority, but worse, the threat that if you mess with the U.S., you’ll get your butt kicked. Now, the boys in the Mideast, the Far East and Chavez and all his pals are sitting back and saying, ‘You ain’t so bad … maybe I could have a go some time.’

Where’s the protest music of the ’60s and ’70s?  You don’t hear any antiwar music, or not that I’m aware of anyway. Although I don’t think you’re completely fair in your statement, there’s much more antiwar sentiment than there used to be; the press did wake up [too late] a few months after the invasion and started to do a little critical reporting. But some of the reporting is news ‘light,’ with reporters without perspective going in for a few weeks and filing stories that miss the mark. Not to say there hasn’t been good reporting done out of Iraq – The New Yorker has had a good core of Iraq stories, Michael Ware [of CNN] has done some good work that takes the story forward, in addition to The New York Times and Frontline. But what’s missing overall has been the big picture.

More American troops have died monthly in Afghanistan than Iraq. The American media doesn’t staff Kabul like Baghdad. If we’re not getting the full story from Iraq now, will we ever get it from Afghanistan in the future? I’m afraid the big picture will elude us in both theaters.

E-mail: matt@northsidesf.com