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GENERAL, YOU'VE GOT IT WRONG

IN PRAISE OF WAR CORRESPONDENTS

Guest columnist Mike Hoyt, of Columbia Journalism Review, introduces his new book, "Reporting Iraq", and explains why he thinks General Ricardo Sanchez was wrong to denounce press coverage of the war ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Iraq is pretty much a mess. This gets reflected in the coverage of the war that made it so, to the dismay of some charged with seeing it through. Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition commander in Iraq from mid-2003 to mid-2006, was among them. The retired general unleashed his frustrations in a speech this month to an organisation of military journalists. He lashed out at the Bush administration and other civilian leaders who have run the war, but also, unfortunately, at the reporters who cover it. It was a passionate speech, but not a good one. And someone ought to push back.

The military leaders in Iraq were handed an awful task. The Bush administration's strategy was to invade and win, without enough thought about what might happen next. As Sanchez put it in the speech, "Starting in July 2003, the message repeatedly communicated to Washington by military commanders on the ground was that the military alone could never achieve ‘victory' in Iraq." He characterised the coalition effort as "hasty, un-resourced, and often uncoordinated and unmanaged," and made clear that he thinks very little of the current "surge" strategy. Iraq, Sanchez concluded, has become a "nightmare with no end in sight."

But then he turned on the press, and his critique was personal.

Sanchez still bristles over being described as "dictatorial and somewhat dense" in the press, by journalists whom he claimed didn't really know him. He also said the press spent far too much time on the scandals of Abu Ghraib. He refused to talk to the European edition of Stars and Stripes, he said, because of that paper's "single-minded focus" on what happened in that prison. (The abuse at Abu Ghraib happened on Sanchez's watch, and likely cost him his fourth star. It is a sore subject.)

After these specifics, such as they were, Sanchez started flinging generalities. A brief taste: "As long as you get your front-page story there is little or no regard for the ‘collateral damage'....The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organisations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas....As I assess various media entities, some are unquestionably engaged in political propaganda that is uncontrolled," etc.

I have trouble stomaching this kind of blather any more, partly because I have co-edited "Reporting Iraq", an oral history of the journalism of the war, out this month from Melville House. In the course of putting it together, I and my colleague, John Palattella, learned how deeply war-reporters care about being accurate witnesses to history.

We wanted to learn how they did their job when more than 100 journalists were being killed and many others injured. The answer: with difficulty. They told us of being threatened at gunpoint, beaten and stoned, and chased by gunmen; of covering battles and seeing soldiers die up close, and of paying the psychic price for that. They told us of taking risks and wearing disguises to blend in and report, and of seeing one Iraq with their eyes but hearing a totally different country described at press conferences, particularly when L. Paul Bremer was in charge.

More than that, we got to hear their insights about Iraq. Not that the reporters were always prescient or always wise (several tell of dismissing early tales of abuse before Abu Ghraib as improbable and unprovable, for example). But they were there, tuned in to omens and portents, and changes in the chemistry and psyche of Iraq. Statesmen and military leaders ought to have paid much more attention to them early on—and should listen to them now. Many of these journalists have covered Iraq since Saddam, and they know things.

If a nation is going to spend billions of dollars in a war that gambles with the future, and kills tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, that nation is going to need independent witnesses who can report on how it's all going. People should stop crying "bias" when it's not going well and when the failures are writ large. The press that covers the war has a mission as vital as any soldier, even a general.

(Mike Hoyt is executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, and the co-editor, with John Palattella, of "Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It".)