On staging events in Iraq..

Vincent's initial trip to Iraq in 2003 resulted in a well-received book called In the Red Zone and an eponymous blog. He earned a great deal of attention on pro-war blogs of a certain stripe when he published an article in the March 2004 issue of Reason magazine. He explained his reasons for going in the article, asking, "How could I truly endorse the war unless I actually went to Iraq? How did I know my assumptions were correct?" However, the passage that garnered the most blog links was this one from a conversation at the famously liberal Shabandar caf�:

"A lot of French journalists are s***," Wady, the sculptor, observed one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored tobacco. "They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way. They don�t care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein." And it�s not only the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S. military: "European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don�t care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments." Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one afternoon weighed in. "Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good," he said. "They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans -- always how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better."

Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven, as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and throw rocks to create an "anti-American" demonstration. "These journalists come here with their minds already made up," he groused. "They�re not interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint."

I'm not saying, nor have I ever said, that the US is perfect and without fault, not even close...I have discussed all kinds of flaws in these pages...and yet you don't wish to discuss, for instance, the share that we all have in battling evil...the sin nature of men and women, et al...further you argue and by doing so claim some sort of unique evil in 'bush' and 'the us', interestingly enough...which of us is closer to getting at the truth?