CNN‘s Brian Stelter—formerly of the New York Times—introduced an interview with New York Times reporter John Burns (Reliable Sources, 6/15/14) by calling him “one of the most famous war correspondents of all time.” This would put Burns in the same league as Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Walt Whitman and Thucydides.
Stelter also says that Burns is “the best person to ask” about “what is happening in Iraq.” That statement is equally dubious.
Burns is the journalist who wrote (New York Times, 3/19/03) as the United States began bombing Iraq, “The striking thing was that for many Iraqis, the first American strike could not come too soon.”
He’s also the reporter (New York Times, 4/4/03) who memorably quoted the opinions of an Iraqi motorist even though he was too far away to hear anything he was saying:
From an 11th-floor balcony of the Palestine Hotel, it was not possible to hear what the driver of the red Mercedes said when he was pulled over halfway down the block, but his gestures conveyed the essence powerfully enough. “Get real,” the driver seemed to be saying. “Look at the sky. Look across the river. The old is giving way to the new.”
Burns was noted for insisting that Iraqis liked being under US military occupation, no matter what actual polls of Iraqis said (Extra!, 11–12/08). But even Burns (New York Times, 3/16/08; FAIR Action Alert, 3/17/08) eventually came to admit that the war hadn’t turned out as splendidly as he expected:
Only the most prescient could have guessed…that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well as nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America’s financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years.
Actually, millions of people anticipated that the war would be both costly and deadly—killing not “tens of thousands,” but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—which is why they were protesting the invasion that Burns was eagerly anticipating. Perhaps one of those people would have been “the best person to ask” about the current crisis in Iraq, since they weren’t so wrong about the invasion that precipitated it.
John Burns interviewed on CNN.
In his interview with Stelter, Burns did, in fact, reflect on where he thinks he went wrong on Iraq:
To speak to the position of people like myself, what mistake did we make? We thought, many of us, that the toppling of Saddam Hussein to end the ghastly brutalities he was besetting upon Iraq, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if it could be accomplished at reasonable cost.
Well, it turned out it couldn’t be accomplished at reasonable cost, and that the American endeavor there was defeated and defeated rather early on, now as we looked back, by the sectarian enmities among the Iraqi people. It was impossible to build a civil society on that shaky, fractured foundation. I think the mistake we made was—I’m talking here about myself as well as some of my colleague, not just at the New York Times but many publications—was not to understand how deeply fractured that society was, how strongly held those animosities were, and how they would not likely relent under any amount of American tutelage and encouragement.
Is it typical for countries to respond to unprovoked military invasions by becoming strong, stable democracies? Perhaps John Burns isn’t the “the best person to ask” about that.
Let’s just say, for sake of argument, that we couldn’t stop the war from starting, certainly none of us managed that.
What Bush did, right away, was reinforce the sectarian divisions. The first council of “Iraqi” leaders was /specifically/ tailored to balance sectarian divisions on the ground.
What if, and I shed a tear thinking of it, we instead had said “We only want /Iraqi/ leaders, people who appeal across these sectarian divides?”
It might not have worked, but the way the stupid Bush administration handled it, this result was almost inevitable.
Again, I cry.
Subject matter like really gets my nerves rankled. Just yesterday while driving around, doing a lot of my thinking, I thought about the hubris of this American, white, male society and how easy it is to justify marching into another country to impose US foreign authority on the culture of the people. All the workshops and books and studies on dealing with different cultures came into my mind. All the criticisms ans self-criticisms for not listening to those who are different in some way in order to create mutual understanding and respect. None of that occured with the lead up to Iraq. And none of the occurred even when it was clear the US was getting its butt creamed while costing the American public billions of dollars. And the cost of those 2 invasions is far from over. The rate of PTSD is killing people literally as suicide rates climb when the soldiers come home. And the diseases caused by US weaponry–all the uranium tipped missiles and other radioactive material. It did not only deform Iraqi children. We hear little of the genetic aberrations of American babies born after the soldiers returned. And they are horrific and heartbreaking. After Iraq I, I read that over 300,000 soldiers died from the effects of the war. i am waiting for the statistics from the 2nd round.
And all of this because of American hubris with its refusal to respect other nations and not giving two seconds of thought as to who these people are that this country trounced.
Ignorant Americans! Ugly Americans. The World’s biggest Terrorists according to polls internationally, as well as at home. Disgusting self-centeredness, callousness. Well, what can we expect when this country lets sociopaths coop an electoral process and promote the neo-con, ie, fascist agenda abroad and at home!
Dear Joshua Simeon Narins:
Please stop crying, and face up to this:
G.W.Bush is certifiably and criminally insane. He is the man who proclaimed publicly in 2005 that “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
And he also proclaimed on American TV, just prior to the invasion of Iraq, that he was launching a “crusade”. This obviously alludes to the religious crusades fought by Christian princes like Richard the Lion-Hearted. We’re talking here about emulating the crazy notions that were rife 1000 years ago. If they were crazy then, they are much more so now.
I think that the verdict on Bush is well expressed by the Jewish-American theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel (who died in 1972, was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement in the USA, and was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War):
“Worship preceded or followed by evil acts becomes an absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds.” “The prophet is a man who sees the world with the eyes of God, and in the sight of God even things of beauty or acts of ritual are an abomination when associated with injustice.” (from The Prophets, Volume I by Abraham Joshua Heschel, page 11 and page 212, Hendrickson Publishers)
I am neither Jewish nor Christian. One doesn’t have to be either to recognize Bush as being the worst sort of false prophet. It is deeply disturbing to me that he has left a horrendous legacy to Americans, and that even now, American politicians are calling for use of force in Iraq again.
“Tutelage and encouragement” isn’t nearly as catchy as “shock and awe,” but perhaps more Iraqis would have been convinced if they had simply listened to John Burns…
There is no way to appropriately summarize the arrogant pigheadedness with which the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Our military response now seems purely political in the national desire for an emotional response to 9/11. However, much like Vietnam, our leaders ham-handedly charged into a region for which we have no real understanding – and have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no real desire to understand.
Our efforts to “liberate” those countries only served to create a seemingly endless supply of new anti-American sentiment.
Regardless, the beginning was always the easy part. Whether we should or should not have invaded is a matter of personal opinion, but, again, the invasions only served to open barely-contained cans of worms. So now what? We destabilized the region – no one is saying that Sadam Hussein was a good guy, but our perpetually-hypocritical stance on foreign intervention through the years makes any argument about doing it for the “right reasons” moot – and now have to deal with what critics were saying for years: how and when does it end?
These invasions put us in politically and militarily impossible situations. As long as soldiers are on the ground, we are seen as invaders. If we leave, we are leaving a vast power vacuum, most likely filled by people or organizations which would not be “beneficial to our interests”.
The only winner is the Military Industrial Complex. And I’m sure many on the Right are salivating at the idea of ramping up the Iraqi theater of war once again. But it isn’t a simple Right/Left issue, really, it’s a corporate power issue. War makes a lot of people a lot of money. As long as that is true, war is inevitable.
Wow, I’m kind of surprised that Burns’s interview technique hasn’t caught on. Why interview somebody when you can just divine what s/he is saying, er put your words in their mouth from your hotel balcony?
Douche.
Burns sounds more like Herodotus than Thucydides. I wonder if he would think that is a compliment.
John Burns says we didn’t know how deeply fractured the country was. However, remember the pack of cards George W. Bush came up with of who the bad guys were in Iraq–half of them were Sunnis and the other half were Shias–the country was not fractured under Saddam Hussein. The cause of the fracturing was because of US decisions
made after our invasion. The US caused the end of the Iraq Army and put Maliki in power. Bremer and Rumsfeld fractured Iraq.
This is a great, if disturbing, example of the tone and thrust of most of the recent Iraq coverage. It can all be summed up pretty easily as, “Iraq falling apart is the fault of the Iraqis. Those stupid, ‘fractious’ Arabs just can’t get along. The US just might have to go in there and help the children clean up their mess.”
What’s not being said, of course — in fact, what’s likely not even *thought* by the high priests of state power — is that the US invasion was itself a supreme war crime, and all the evil that followed was the reasonably predictable result of the invasion, as recognized at Nuremberg — if that means anything today. Just as bombing Iraq now would be illegal, which again never merits mention, let alone rises to the level of consciousness among the power worshipers.
What’s the cabbie saying? “The sheriff is near.”
@AF – I couldn’t agree with you more… with the exception of one small statement: “Whether we should or should not have invaded is a matter of personal opinion.”
I would argue it’s more a matter of morality (with regard to the war hawks and their lapdog media) and ignorance (willful or otherwise) on the part of the general public.