I dunno about you but I'm getting pretty weary of folks who go to Iraq for 48 hours, most of which is spent taking a well-guarded tour that has been carefully planned by their hosts…and then they come back and claim expertise on how the situation in Iraq is going. To me, that's like having a condo salesman show you the model unit and then deciding you're an expert on how the whole building was constructed.
This applies to folks who come back saying the war is going great and the soldiers there are all behind it just as much as it applies to those who report that it's a total disaster and every person in a uniform told them so. It's anecdotal reporting that has everything to do with where they went, what they were shown, who they spoke with, etc. I'm much more interested in the views of people who've been there for some length of time and went, not as tourists to be shown around but as working grunts, be they troops or reporters.
This op-ed in The New York Times is by seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers who are completing 15-month tours of duty over there. They don't think much of the war effort or the optimism that its supporters are touting in the press…and while their views are hardly inarguable, I think they're a lot more significant than the likes of Joe Lieberman, reporting how well things are going after he spends a day or two over there, being shown areas that will enable him to come back and say it's a trip to the Westfield Mall. So read that piece and then read what my man Fred Kaplan has to say about it.