Iraq Through Rose Colored Glasses

Ralph Peters, writing for the NewYork Post from Iraq, has managed the feat of seeing only good things in his travels through Baghdad. No car bombings, no corpses in the streets (let alone in the central morgue), no radical mullahs inciting their flocks at Friday prayers, no long lines at gas stations, no periodic electric blackouts, plenty of body armor and flak vests to go around, and children everywhere cheering American troops. Just like Cheney and Rumsfeld had predicted way back before the war.

Forget all those dreadful television images from Iraq in the two-plus week since the Golden Mosque was blown up. The slavishly partisan Peters infers that they're fig newtons of your imagination.

Peters makes some serious allegations: That the Big, Bad Liberal Media is only interested in bad news and doesn't let facts stand in the way of a gory . . . er, good story. That the Iraqis are pathological exaggerators, so claims that there were 1,300 corpses in the Baghdad central morgue last week following the orgy of sectarian violence were untrue. And that the New York Times declared that a civil war already was underway, but for the life of him he can't find it.

Well, let's see.

A careful reading of the Times shows that it has made no such claim about civil war, only that the people to whom it spoke in and out of the U.S. and Iraqi governments and military believed that the country was teetering on the brink of war following the Feb. 22 mosque bombing.

Sure Iraqis exaggerate. They've been taught well by the White House and Pentagon public relations apparatus. As it was, a Washington Post reporter saw and counted some 1,300 bodies at the central morgue.

Whether a story is positive or negative is in the eyes of the beholder, but I find the Times to have made an effort to leaven the bad news with upbeat stories. Yet somehow pieces such as those on GIs teaching young Iraqis how to play baseball or how some Army units have innovatively adapted to meet the challenges of the occupation or the wonderful advances in battlefield triage and medevac are quickly forgotten when there is another flareup of violence.

Peters' Post column contains not one quote, not one fact, only broad brush strokes painted through rose-colored glasses from the seat of an armored Humvee as it speeds through Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods.

Peters' antipathy toward actually talking to people is weird.

He might have chatted with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who told the Los Angeles Times the other day that

The potential is there for an all out civil war (and) if another incident occurs, Iraq is really vulnerable to it at this time, in my judgment.

Or he might have invited himself over to Major Gen. Mubdar Hatim al-Dulaimi's digs. The general commands the Iraqi Army division in Baghdad and is in the know.

Oh sorry, the honorable general was filleted in an ambush Monday in Baghdad, one of 11 people to die in guerrilla attacks in and near the capital, according to the Big Bad Liberal Media. I can only suppose that Peters thought those were gorilla attacks (maybe some escaped from the zoo) and was across town tossing Hershey's Kisses from his Humvee to cheering street urchins.

Two more people were killed this morning outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. There also was a shootout between insurgents and Iraqi cops that left five officers wounded, while another cop was wounded nearby while trying to defuse a bomb. I can only suppose that Peters thought those attacks were by immigrants and the cop was dealing with an angry bum; you know, one of the underclass left over from when Saddam ran the show. (Then again, maybe the immigrants were trying to round up the gorillas or defuse the bum). No matter, Peters probably has moved on to sniff more flowers elsewhere in Iraq's Elysian Fields.

There is a term in crude journalistic parlance for how the syncophantic Peters "reports" and writes and how the slavishly pro-Bush administration Post has covered the war generally.

It's called a blowjob. And it sucks.