With Balance Like This... -

With Balance Like This... - The slow slog toward balanced coverage in Iraq seems to be gathering the strangest bedfellows. Even the Guardian's Julie Flint, famous for her hilariously-slanted reporting before the war, is getting on board.

Oh, it starts rough::

Half a century ago, in a blistering denunciation of the Korean war, the British war correspondent Reginald Thompson wrote: 'It was clear that there was something profoundly disturbing about this campaign and something profoundly disturbing about its commander-in-chief.' Thompson's words could equally well apply to the US-led campaign in Iraq and its commander-in-chief: George W. Bush, head of a cabal that seeks to install a client regime in Iraq as a first step to bringing the region under American-Israeli control.

But she gradually cuts to the chase:

But there is something disturbing, too, about the way that post-war Iraq has been portrayed. Visceral distrust of Bush/Blair has created a disregard both for fact and for the victims of Saddam. Arab commentators have had no shame in urging Iraqis, exhausted by three wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to launch a new war 'of liberation' against their liberators. Western commentators have luxuriated in the setbacks of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as if wishing failure upon it - and by extension, the Iraqi people.

Disaster has been prophesied, self-servingly, at every turn: the war would be long (it wasn't, and most Iraqis had no direct experience of it); tens of thousands would die in the battle for Baghdad (they didn't); there would be a fully-fledged humanitarian disaster (there wasn't). Now, we are told, Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil war. Not those I know. Not yet. Nor those polled in Baghdad last month by Gallup: 62 per cent thought getting rid of Saddam was worth the suffering they've endured; 67 per cent thought their lives will be better five years from now.

The article is interesting -partly for its facts, partly for the gyrations Flint goes through to fit snippets of her leftist views into the piece at the most incongruous turns.

Worth a a read, anyway.

Posted by Mitch at October 8, 2003 06:00 AM