GIVE BURNS A PULITZER

I know I’m not out on a limb here, but John F. Burns’ reporting for the New York Times from Iraq is up there with the greatest. What he was able to do was to report factually, carefully, objectively, while still giving the Saddamite police state no quarter. He saw what tyranny does to people, and his obviously deep love of human freedom enabled him to get at deeper truths than so many others did. Now we find that he was targeted by Saddam and lived in fear of his life in the final days of the war:

At midnight on April 1, without warning, a group of men led by Mr. Muthanna, identifying themselves as intelligence agents, broke into my room at the Palestine Hotel. The men, in suits and ties, at least one with a holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known “for a long time” that I was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, that I was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to “cooperate” would lead to more serious consequences. “For you, it will be the end,” Mr. Muthanna said. “Where we will take you, you will not return.”

Burns, mercifully, endured till the end, decried by one Iraqi Information Ministry official as “the most dangerous man in Iraq.” Not quite. But truth is always a danger to tyrants. And Burns carried it high. Kudos to him and, yes, to Howell Raines, for giving him the prominence and space he so richly deserves.

THE MEANING OF FAMILY: Sometimes a picture says it all.

WHILE I WAS AWAY

I’ll never forget my once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Michael Oakeshott. I’d written most of my doctoral dissertation on the great man’s work by the time I actually met him so you can imagine the pressure of the day and the anticipation. He didn’t disappoint me but I think I disappointed him. At one point he asked me what I was intending to do after graduate school. “I think I’ll be a journalist,” I said. “Oh dear,” he replied, his pixie-smile suddenly collapsing. “I’ve always thought that the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder.” Can you imagine what he’d say about blogging? It was indeed wonderful for the nerves to spend a few days without the newspaper or the internet. I took in a fabulous trip to Austin, a riveting “Richard III” at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater (if you want to see good Shakespeare, it’s far better to live in D.C. than in provincial New York City), and then, last night, the deliriously delicious “A Mighty Wind.” (Conspiracy theorists will be thrilled to know that I went with Ken Adelman, James Taranto and Richard Miniter to R3. We all took notes. What a master propagandist that Shakespeare fellow was. And of course Henry Tudor won in a cakewalk.)

BUT I DIGRESS…: Still, I now know, after catching up a bit, that plenty of non-U.S. companies will have a share in Iraqi reconstruction, that, among other pro-environment decisions, the Bush administration has proposed some of the greenest diesel fuel standards in history, and that the New York Times continues to bleed talent in the wake of the Raines reign of terror. So pretty much what you’d expect, no?

BBC WATCH

Two small items from last week. As this blog recently lamented, the BBC has just produced a dramatic series designed to defend and glamorize the famous Communist spy ring that infiltrated M.I.6 during the Cold War. One astute analyst of the script has described it as little more than “KGB propaganda.” Stalin, Saddam … idealists and patriots all. Then there was the classic BBC description of the looting that occurred after the liberation of Baghdad. The news organization pronounced that Iraqis were now living in “more fear than they have ever known.” The Blair government protested the coverage.

“TONY THE HAT”

Not a mobster, Just a priceless, British obit.

THE BEEB APOLOGIZES: From Private Eye (Britain’s Onion), an apology from the BBC:

In the light of recent events, we now accept – albeit with a very bad grace – that the coalition forces seem for the time being to have got away with it, and that large numbers of Iraqis, though clearly paid by the CIA to do so, may have appeared to be not entirely displeased at the downfall of a regime which, whatever its faults, did at least for 30 years guarantee the stability of a potentially explosive mix of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, who will now undoubtedly plunge the whole region into a state of chaos which will threaten the peace of the world.
Whilst apologising for any confusion to which our reports may have given rise (and allowing for the fact that they could be broadcast only under monitoring restrictions imposed by the Iraqi authorities), we now realise that the only hope for future peace is for the hated Bush/Blair imperialist aggressors to be replaced at once by a French-led UN force of Russian troops of the type who were so successful in bringing peace to the Muslims of Groszny.

Yep, that just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

POSEUR ALERT

“The truth about my name is that… I believe that people choose their names and that our names say a lot about what our destiny in life is. So I discovered that my birthday was October 3rd and Mahatma Gandhi was October 2nd. But when I discovered it I knew there was something to it. Once I started making music I started to understand that the political statements I make in my music and doing it in an honest but non-offensive way said a lot about his character and the peaceful protests. And my brother’s also born on Martin Luther King’s birthday. So I think it says a lot about my mother and my father’s children and who we are. I got my name because I chose it in Heaven.” – India Arie, on the BBC’s “Woman’s Hour,” radio show, noted by Private Eye (whose “Pseuds’ Corner” concept this blog shamelessly ripped off).

BAY AREA SECESSION? Independence for “weirdoes and misfits”? Nah. We need them. We love them. They’re part of the mix. And without the rest of us, they wouldn’t be misfits, would they?

AFTER ENABLING SADDAM: Some peaceniks even side with Mugabe, if it means swiping at Bush. Way to go, guys!

CAN’T HELP MYSELF

This passage from the BBC about Abu Abbas simply defies belief. No use of the term “terrorist,” of course:

A wanted Palestinian fugitive, Abu Abbas, has been detained by US forces in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. He led the Palestinian Liberation Front, which hijacked a US cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in 1985. During the hijack, an elderly American passenger died. Abu Abbas had been mentioned by US President George W Bush as an example of the kind of figure given refuge by the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

In subsequent versions, the BBC seems to have substituted the term “was killed” for “died.” I guess even they have their limits in terrorism apologetics.

JUSTICE

“Among the attacks that had a strong political edge were those on the German Embassy and the French cultural center, both in east Baghdad. Few Iraqis were unaware, in the weeks preceding the war, that France and Germany were leading international efforts to force President Bush into accepting an extension of United Nations weapons inspections here, and to delay military action against Mr. Hussein. The French and German buildings were stripped of furniture, curtains, decorations, and anything else that could be carried away. At the French cultural center, where looters burst water pipes and flooded the ground floor, books were left floating in the reading rooms and corridors, and a photograph of Jacques Chirac, the French president, was smashed. French reporters said the French Embassy, also on the Tigris’s east bank, appeared to have been spared because it remained under the protection of French military guards. The German Embassy was unprotected.” – John F. Burns, New York Times today.

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

“Perhaps we cannot make this a world in which children are no longer tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children,” – Albert Camus.

“The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children – toddlers up to pre-adolescents – whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.” – Scott Ritter, Time Magazine.