Michael Totten is a good guy, and he has traveled to Baghdad to see things for himself. His first installation is here.
I hope he comes home in one piece.
by John Cole| 17 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, War, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Michael Totten is a good guy, and he has traveled to Baghdad to see things for himself. His first installation is here.
I hope he comes home in one piece.
Comments are closed.
Walker
He seems like a straight shooter. But I start to question his biases when he says stuff like this:
We aren’t looking at individual attacks in the media; we have numbers. In June, Iraq had the most number of coalition attacks since “Mission Accomplished”. So either his point is that Iran has never really been “defined by war”, or he is asserting that his anecdotal experience is representive.
Anecdotes are useful for formulating theories, but they are not useful as supporting evidence for those theories. This is a failing of both pro-war and anti-war media.
The Pirate
I wonder if he still thinks the pro-invasion folks were on “the right side of history.”
ATS
Totten is only “reasonable” compared wth the OSP crowd. Relocate him abroad (e.g. Europe) and he’d be judged a jingoist US tub thumper and a Labour party zionist at best. Pious aides, and an amiable demeanor sure as hell don’t change that.
ATS
Totten is only “reasonable” compared wth the OSP crowd. Relocate him abroad (e.g. Europe) and he’d be judged a jingoist US tub thumper and a Labour party zionist at best. Pious aides, and an amiable demeanor sure as hell don’t change that.
capelza
Totten is sincere, I’ll give him that.
When Israel attakced Lebanon, he was so torn by it, he knew people there, it was personal for him) and wrote about that. His comment section was very interesting. His fellow hawks turned on him in a not very pretty way.
Haven’t been there for awhile, well since then really, but I wonder if that lesson sank in at all for him. Sounds like maybe it hasn’t.
Randy Paul
Capelza,
He hasn’t, especially when he spouts nonsense like this:
I’ve lived in both blue and red states and the only thing I’ve learned is that generalizations about “most people” are for the intellectually lazy.
capelza
Randy Paul.
That is extremely lazy of him. He lives in Oregon (or did) and he should know damn well that’s a lot of bullshit. God, what a load of drivel.
Andrew
I’m pretty sure this means that they are assholes with expensive watches they bought in Dubai.
Rome Again
Sweeping generalizations just about always are, right Cassidy?
Newell Blair
He does seem like a guy who at least makes something of an effort to be honest.
But like most Western reporters he doesn’t speak Arabic and is therefore extremely limited in his sources. He must either talk to the educated English-speaking elite, who have many biases of their own, or try to use a translator, which brings tons of other problems.
Because of his weak sourcing, he often flatly reports extremely questionable and sometimes just inaccurate claims (especially in his Lebanon reporting, he even said Nasrallah wasn’t a religious scholar ‘Alim’ which is insane. He didn’t also seem to know this word, which is sort of like to report on catholic affairs without knowing the meaning of “cardinal.”)
He seems like he makes an effort to report both sides, and he’s certainly not worse than other Western reporters, but I can’t really see much special about him other than a pleasant writing style.
John Cole
Because anymore, honest people make me extremely pleased.
Randy Paul
Newell Blair,
I know exactly what you mean.
incontrolados
Sorry, but anyone who still links to LGF, whether by ommission or commission, doesn’t ring true to me.
That taint carries through.
searp
I just got back for the second time this year. What he describes is just standard procedure. Think about it: he got there with just a few delays, courtesy of DoD, which is understandably more concerned with moving soldiers.
The austerity and strangeness of it all shocked me the first time, but this comes from not understanding how the military lives. Conditions at Ali Al Salem, BIAP, and the Green Zone are good! Much worse at other locations. Soldiers understand and are used to it, even if they don’t like it much. Michael Totten will get used to it.
Geoduck
Here are some comments by someone who was less than impressed with the report..
Tom S
It would take a special kind of insanity to claim–on the basis of Totten’s piece–that the situation in Iraq is not as bad as the media is saying. If it takes 16 hours to get from the Bagdhad airport to the Green Zone because of security conditions and procedures, Bagdhad is far from pacified.
searp
We aren’t even trying to pacify the country in the sense that Americans can walk around without an armed escort. One aspect of the situation in Iraq is pretty simple: foreigners of any nation, but especially the US, are not at all welcome and will be kidnapped or killed if they wander around without a substantial armed guard.
The goal, as I understand it, is to make the country safe for Iraqis. This may well be a hill that cannot be climbed.