From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Mistaken
Identity
Yesterday we got an e-mail from an old friend who is a captain in the U.S. Army.
He writes:
I just got back from my third deployment from Iraq on Friday, and I happened to be at the dentist and saw a completely offensive ad from the idiots at MoveOn.org this morning. Anyway, it is a Bush-bashing ad that pretends to be arguing for American soldiers families as they will miss the holidays and it shows turkey and crying wives and blames Bush for it all. Here is the crucial part of the ad that I would like to bring to your attention. As they pretend to argue on my behalf, they show a group of soldiers standing around a table in the Middle East.
Here's the scene to which our friend refers:
"A hundred and fifty thousand American men and women are stuck in Iraq," according to the narration that accompanies this scene. Our friend (we've cleaned up a bit of his language for civilian consumption) continues:
These are not your normal everyday U.S. soldiers though. If you look at the frame they are actually British soldiers. One is in shorts (we don't have shorts as a normal combat uniform) and the others are all clearly wearing British pattern fatigues. So, my point is that these [turkeys] pretend to argue on my behalf and bash the president in the name of my crying wife, and they don't even know what an American soldier looks like! Anyway, it really [ticked] me off.
The only thing that would have made this more galling is if the ad had mentioned that the liberation of Iraq was "unilateral."
'A
Reverse Vietnam'
Mark Sappenfield, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, had an ingenious
idea: Why not interview an actual serviceman who fought in Iraq? The result,
datelined Brook Park, Ohio, is a groundbreaking bit of journalism:
Cpl. Stan Mayer has seen the worst of war. In the leaves of his photo album, there are casual memorials to the cost of the Iraq conflict--candid portraits of friends who never came home and graphic pictures of how insurgent bombs have shredded steel and bone.
Yet the Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies.
Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity--if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops' individual experiences.
You've gotta love this. Looking at "the broader picture" means disparaging the "individual experiences" of those who are actually sacrificing to defeat the enemy and rebuild Iraq, and it means presenting Iraq as pretty much "solely a place of death and loss." It means, in short, following a predetermined script: Iraq as another Vietnam.
Glenn Reynolds argues that for this reason Iraq is really "a reverse Vietnam." He notes an exchange on CNN's "Reliable Sources" between host Howard Kurtz and United Press International's Pamela Hess:
Kurtz: Pam Hess, during Vietnam U.S. officials were often accused of distorting or even lying to the press to try to make it look like the war effort was going better than it was. When you were in Iraq did you feel like you were getting the straight story?
Hess: Certainly from the militarily I did. They have no interest in cooking the books, as it were, they--they understand that they were blamed for Vietnam and what happened, and they don't want that blame again.
They want people to understand the kind of enemy that they are facing and how long it's going to take. And frankly, most of them said to me, "Please go back and tell them not to pull us out because we are finally at a point where we have enough people here now on the ground between soldiers and Iraqis that we can actually start doing some good and start turning things around. And if you pull us out, we're just going to be back here three years from now."
Kurtz: More optimistic, at least than some of the journalists.
Hess: Yes.
When you think about it, the media actually have an institutional interest in seeing the good guys lose in Iraq. If America prevails after years of doom-and-gloom "reporting," a lot of journalists are going to look awfully silly.
Now
This Is What We Call Intelligence
"Al Qaida leaders Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi haven't been found 'primarily
because they don't want us to find them and they're going to great lengths to
make sure we don't find them,' [CIA director Porter] Goss said in the interview
broadcast Tuesday on ABC's 'Good Morning America.' "--Associated Press,
Nov. 29
USA,
R.I.P.
Well, it's pretty much all over for America. Valerie Plame, the "glamorous
secret agent" who has been the linchpin of U.S. national security, "will
retire next month from the CIA after 20 years tracking proliferators of weapons
of mass destruction," the New York Post reports. "She remained at
the CIA for the past year in order to be eligible for a full government pension."
Or at least that's her cover story.
Yaser
Alamoodi, Party Animal
Yesterday we
noted that Yaser Alamoodi, the Saudi president of Arizona State University's
student government, is urging a ban on students posing for Playboy and similar
magazines on the ground that ASU's image as a party school is harmful to its
academic reputation.
In October 2004 Alamoodi gave an interview to the New Times, a Phoenix alternative weekly. It seems that with a presidential debate coming to town, the FBI had visited Alamoodi to conduct some prophylactic questioning, which gave rise to this exchange in the New Times interview:
NT: If they do come back, just ask them to take you out to dinner that night. You'll have the perfect alibi: "I couldn't have bombed the presidential debates; I was out to dinner with the FBI."
Alamoodi: I'm all dangerous now. Man, I haven't gotten laid so much in my life as I did after 9/11.
NT: So all at once you were hot with white chicks after September 11?
Alamoodi: Girls always confuse sympathy with sex. And guys are always up for it. And I'm not gonna say no.
Good to see someone is upholding ASU's reputation as a serious academic institution.
The
European Social Model
A Reuters photo caption describes the social breakdown and indifference that
prevail in the heart of Continental Europe:
People walk past as a homeless person takes cover from the cold on a Paris sidewalk November 28, 2005, as six homeless have died in France since the arrival of winter temperatures. French authorities have raised their weather alert in 31 departments and asked for increased vigilance to the homeless in Paris.
There may be relief in store, though. Agence France-Presse reports: "Europe is facing the worst climate change in five millennia as a result of global warming, the European Environment Agency (EAA) warned." Note that heartless European elites oppose global warming, whereas it was President Bush who nixed the Kyoto treaty in an effort to save Paris's homeless from glaciation.
Money
Well Spent?
Our item yesterday on pop star Bono's $1,700 hat shipment prompted this amusing
e-mail from reader Paulette Murphy:
Here is my "top ten" list of what Bono could have done for needy people around the world with the $1,700 he frivolously spent to have his favorite hat delivered to him in Italy. (I didn't presume to put them in any order of importance, I just listed them in order of how many people each gift would help.)
- Fed 188 malnourished babies for a week in famine-stricken villages and impoverished communities around the world.
- Given 170 mosquito nets treated with natural insecticide to protect children in developing countries as they sleep from mosquitos who may infect them with deadly malaria, encephalitis or dengue fever. (Malaria alone kills one African child every 30 seconds.)
- Helped 113 poor children to learn to read and write in places like Afghanistan and in the isolated tribal areas of Thailand and Vietnam.
- Sent life-saving food for two months to 48 refugee families who are near starvation in places like Darfur.
- For a month, cared for 42 orphans who have AIDS in Africa and Asia. (Sixteen million orphans have AIDS and the number is increasing.)
- Helped to build a school for 42 impoverished children in the remote villages of South Asia or war-ravaged towns of East Africa.
- Supplied 22 thirsty families in the Third World with clean water from new freshwater wells, filters and purification projects. (At least two million people, mostly children, die annually from contaminated water or waterborne diseases.)
- Transformed 22 lives with the gift of a wheelchair for poverty-stricken and disabled people living in Latin America, Africa or Asia.
- Rescued eight children from bondage and abuse by human traffickers from Africa to Southeast Asia to Latin America.
- For another $300, saved a child's life by buying an airline ticket to fly a child to North America for life-saving heart surgery through the Children's Heart Project.
Heck, with most of these, there would even be a little money left over to buy a needy person a hat.
Now to be fair, I don't know how much charitable giving Bono does. Perhaps he is very generous, perhaps even more so than I am. But I just couldn't help be astonished at what he did. Of course, if he really wanted to sacrifice, he could auction off his favorite hat and raise a whole lot more money to donate. If he could actually live without it, that is.
Murphy tells us the source of these ideas is the Samaritan's Purse Christmas Gift Catalog.
The
World's Smallest Violin
"With
the cost of tuition rising every year and conservatory students spending as
much as six years in school, many . . . are swamped in debt as they
enter a field in which jobs are scarce and salaries often low," Reuters
reports from Boston. As a result, many aspiring musicians are being forced to
resort to actual work:
Jennifer Myung owes $55,000 to the U.S. government, and for the first time, she isn't worried about paying it back. That's because she has swapped a budding career as a concert violinist for an investment banking job.
Actually, we don't mean to be snarky about this. There is much to be said for an artistic career, and more generally for labors of love. But we were just too weak to resist the headline.
Homer
Nods
Jimmy Carter struck a deal in 1994 with Kim Il Sung, not his son Kim Jong Il;
and the younger Kim is a Zypod, not a Zyphon, contrary to our item yesterday
(since corrected).
There's
Only One 'R' in 'Caprine'
This correction appears in today's New York Times (third item):
Because of an editing error, an article on Oct. 27 about the fruit of the threatened Moroccan argan tree, used to produce an oil for gourmet cooking and cosmetics, omitted a complete explanation of how exported Argan oil is produced. While some Moroccans make oil from argan pits that have been excreted by grazing goats, none of those pits are used to make the oil that is exported. Because of that error, the article also carried a misleading headline. While goats do climb Argan trees to eat the fruit, they are not "doing their bit for gourmands."
The
Vision Thing
Dallas County, Texas, is building a new jail, and it "plans to station
individual jail guards inside each 'tank' of inmates to provide direct supervision
of the jail population," reports the Dallas Morning News:
"I was against it at first, because of having an officer in each tank with up to 62 inmates," said Deputy Chief Edgar McMillan Jr. "But I don't see any cons. . . ."
Sounds as though McMillan needs to visit an ophthalmologist.
Poor
Docs Wore Scrubs
"Reading X-Rays in Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor"--headline, New
York Times, Nov. 29
A
Victory for PETA
"Colts Remain Unbeaten"--headline, Miami Herald, Nov. 29
Thanks
for the Tip!--XVIII
"Health Tip: Snowboard Safely"--headline, HealthDayNews, Nov. 29
We
Know a More Reliable Test
"Experts Say Online Gender Test Unreliable"--headline, WAVE-TV Web
site (Louisville, Ky.), Nov. 28
They
Might Try Closing the Door
"Sperm Donors Need More Privacy"--headline, Daily Campus (University
of Connecticut), Nov. 28
Are
They Telling the Truth About Why They Lie?
"Women Lie in Bed for Space Research"--headline, FoxNews.com, Nov. 28
Maybe
They Should Stick With Planes
"Airlines Struggle With Wheelchairs"--CNNMoney.com, Nov. 28
Sounds
Like a Bumpy Ride
"Helicopter to Survey City's Underground Resources"--headline, Santa
Fe New Mexican, Nov. 29
No
Kidding
"Air New Zealand and Qantas have banned men from sitting next to unaccompanied
children on flights, sparking accusations of discrimination," reports the
New Zealand Press Association:
The airlines have come under fire for the policy that critics say is political correctness gone mad after a man revealed he was ordered to change seats during a Qantas flight because he was sitting next to a young boy travelling alone.
Auckland man Mark Worsley says an air steward approached him after take-off on the Christchurch to Auckland flight and told him to change seats with a women [sic] sitting two rows in front. The steward said it was the airline's policy that only women were allowed to sit next to unaccompanied children.
"At the time I was so gobsmacked that I moved. I was so embarrassed and just stewed on it for the entire flight," Mr Worsley said.
So let's see: These two airlines are letting the world know that they think roughly half of their adult passengers are potential child molesters. This seems like a good way of discouraging men from flying, as well as discouraging parents from letting their kids fly. On the other hand, some men are doubtless grateful that they won't have to sit next to some loud kid. So maybe there's something to be said for this marketing strategy.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Doug Philippone, Heather Robinson, Monty Krieger, Ethel Fenig, Joshua Berger, Jorge Bonilla, Andrew Robinson, Brett Sembach, Don Hubschman, Tipton Cole, Hyman Sisman, Bob Cantwell, C.E. Dobkin, David Schlosser, Tony Daniel, James Currin, P.J. Moriarity, David Hoffman, Michael Segal, Edward Schulze, Chris Bartony, Rick Skeean, Bill Schweber, Matthew McInteer, Daniel Cassaro, Earl Pansano, Ruth Papazian, Phil Hord, Mark Murray, Matthew Bradley, Chuck Opramolla, Bill Green, Bernie Slattery, Thomas Dillon, Scott Plante and Christopher Desmond. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Joe Lieberman: America can't abandon 27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists.
- Brendan Miniter: South Carolina Republicans will cut taxes--or else.
- Robert Messenger: The Navy learned from its mistakes at the Battle of Midway.
