L. Paul Bre­mer just doesn’t know when to quit. He writes an op-ed defend­ing the deci­sion — now no longer [“his” decision](http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/april27/bremer-042705.html) — to dis­band the Iraqi Army in 2003. There’s noth­ing new in this op-ed to con­tend with more recent report­ing — such as that from Charles Ferguson’s doc­u­men­tary “[No End in Sight](http://noendinsightmovie.com/)” — that the Iraqi Army did not “dis­solve” as Bre­mer main­tains, but was wait­ing for a sig­nal. Bremer’s order sent a sig­nal all right — you’re not wanted. Full dis­clo­sure: I am in Ferguson’s movie talk­ing about the Iraqi Army wait­ing for the CPA to call it back.
What is new is a time­line of the deci­sion to dis­band the army that does seem to show that higher-ups such as Don­ald Rums­feld and the Pres­i­dent were aware of the order and at least tac­itly approved of it. That doesn’t make it the right deci­sion, how­ever. Bre­mer still says it was the right thing to do, and ends his op-ed with this howler:

Despite all the dif­fi­cul­ties encoun­tered, Iraq’s new pro­fes­sional sol­diers are the country’s most effec­tive and trusted secu­rity force. By con­trast, the Baathist-era police force, which we did recall to duty, has proven unre­li­able and is mis­trusted by the very Iraqi peo­ple it is sup­posed to protect.

Is he kid­ding? First of all the new police force has been recon­sti­tuted about three times now, and it’s not dis­trusted because it’s a Ba’athist-dominated force but because Shi’ite death squads and mili­tias now run it. [New reports just out today](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090501282.html) show the Army to be rel­a­tively inef­fec­tive. It may very well be the “most effec­tive and trusted secu­rity force,” but that’s not really say­ing much is it?

NAHR EL-BARED, Lebanon — Was­sim al-Hagehussein was wor­ried. The Lebanese sol­dier was twitchy, sus­pi­cious as he stalked through the dark and pow­er­less gro­cery store where Was­sim worked. It was a day after Prime Min­is­ter Fuad Sin­iora had declared an end to the war over the Pales­tin­ian camp Nahr el-Bared, dur­ing which fanat­i­cal jihadists had fought off an Army onslaught for 106 days. And now, today, the fight­ing had started up again and the gro­cery store was in the cross­fire. A com­pany of sol­diers was pinned down by an unknown num­ber of Fatah al-Islam fugi­tive fighters.

“Are there any Pales­tini­ans in here?” the sol­dier asked the owner, Rabieh al-Masri, who was a boss and a friend to Was­sim. The sol­diers had just arrested another Pales­tin­ian in front of the store and taken him in for questioning.

Al-Masri delib­er­ately didn’t look at Was­sim. “No,” he said. “There are no Pales­tini­ans here.”

He was lying. Was­sim was a Pales­tin­ian from Nahr el-Bared.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Recently, my old boss, Jay Rosen, a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor at NYU, [penned a response](http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-rosen22aug22,0,4771551.story) to Michael Skube, who said that by and large, blog­gers rely on pub­lished report­ing from estab­lished media out­lets and [don’t pro­vide a great deal of orig­i­nal report­ing on their own](http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-skube19aug19,0,1667466.story?coll=la-news-comment). Opin­ion and argu­ment is the cur­rency of the of blo­gos­phere, not report­ing — a state­ment that seems rather self-evident if you spend any time on the Internet.

But that’s not good enough for Jay. He had to go and find exam­ples of blog­gers doing jour­nal­ism to show that *there is so* report­ing on the Net. In the process of find­ing 14 exam­ples — includ­ing me, which I’ll deal with in a moment — Jay attempted to put to rest Skube’s claim. Instead, he proved it.

Some of the blog­gers men­tioned in Jay’s piece, espe­cially the ones doing “real” report­ing, are already reporters in “real life.” Josh Mar­shall was a Wash­ing­ton jour­nal­ist before he started [Talk­ing Points Memo](http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com). Michael Yon was a pub­lished author before he started his blog and today he’s sup­ported by a com­bi­na­tion of reader dona­tions and free­lanc­ing to places like *The Weekly Stan­dard* and Fox News. (They’re reprint­ing his dis­patches, but pre­sum­ably he’s get­ting some cash for this.)

Oth­ers are no doubt pro­vid­ing a pub­lic ser­vice and even doing some jour­nal­ism. Good for them. When I started Back-to-Iraq, almost five years ago, I was hope­ful that [my brand of online journalism](http://www.back-to-iraq.com/2003/02/iraq-or-bust.php), sup­ported by the pub­lic, would take off. That’s not been the case. Why? Because doing jour­nal­ism is expensive.

Josh has investors. Michael free­lances and embeds him­self where his costs are mainly paid for by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. (Food, trans­porta­tion around Iraq, con­nec­tion costs, etc.) And as for me, I stopped get­ting dona­tions long ago — I got kind of bored by the hus­tle required — and I sup­port myself by free­lanc­ing. And that brings me to my point. Jay’s list of 14 sites proves Skube’s cen­tral idea: there are very, very few blogs out there doing what might be called orig­i­nal report­ing. A friend of mine called it the Yertle-the-Turle Syn­drome: “blovi­a­tor on top of blovi­a­tor on top of blovi­a­tor on top of one lowly reporter, buried at the bot­tom of the pile, gath­er­ing the facts of the mat­ter,” he said.

As for me, I am not a “blog­ger.” I am a jour­nal­ist who chose to blog to make a career move. I am still a jour­nal­ist, proudly embed­ded in the so-called main­stream media, which gen­er­ates about 99.9999% of the orig­i­nal report­ing today. When I was first get­ting ready to go to Iraq in early 2003, many reporters called me and asked me why I was doing it, why blog? “I blog,” I said, “for the same rea­son I don’t use a man­ual type­writer instead of a lap­top. It’s the best tool for the job.” I still believe that in my case.

The arti­cles that Jay linked that I wrote were all done when I was in Iraq for *[TIME Magazine](http://www.time.com)*. I’m not sure why he didn’t link to [my report­ing from April 2003](http://www.back-to-iraq.com/2003/04/) dur­ing the inva­sion, when it really *was* just for the blog, but there you go. I’ve been a jour­nal­ist since 1990, when I started at the *Arkansas Demo­c­rat* in Lit­tle Rock. I have a degree from Colum­bia University’s Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism and I’ve worked for The Asso­ci­ated Press, the *New York Daily News* and free­lanced for more news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines than I care to remem­ber. (They include *New York* mag­a­zine, *TIME, Boston Globe, Newark Star-Ledger, Die Zeit, Wash­ing­ton TImes, San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Sin­ga­pore Strait-Times* and oth­ers.) I’m work­ing on pitches for *Esquire* and oth­ers right now. Almost every day I’m engaged in shoe-leather report­ing here in Lebanon and the wider Mid­dle East and I try keep my opin­ions pre­sented on this blog backed up by my own report­ing. (It’s not a per­fect sys­tem; some­times I rant.)

Blog­ging can be really great. It’s empow­er­ing for the indi­vid­ual, you can do some risky stuff (you need to watch your facts, ethics, etc.) and it allows you to get your stuff out there when you can’t get the stuff in a mag­a­zine. The cul­ture has moved in such a way that includ­ing blog clips is per­fectly respectable to include now for a writ­ing assign­ment. But equat­ing the aver­age blog with jour­nal­ism done by sea­soned pros at the The New York Times or the Wash­ing­ton Post is wrong. It cheap­ens what costs money and time to pro­duce and it reduces the value of the “prod­uct.” It helps turn news into a com­mod­ity that makes jour­nal­ism worse because news­pa­pers can’t fig­ure out how to make money off it. And if they can’t do that, they’ll close down or scale back cov­er­age — to the detri­ment of all. Tragedy of the com­mons and all.

So, blog away, but please leave me out of the lists show­ing blog­gers doing jour­nal­ism. A blog is just a medium after all. Is every­one on TV a news anchor just because they share a stu­dio? Of course not. So at the risk of sound­ing elit­ist, just because I have a blog doesn’t mean I’m in your club — or you in mine.

[geolo­ca­tion]

BEIRUT — The fight over the Pales­tin­ian refugee camp Nahr el-Bared up north is over. The Lebanese Army stormed the last posi­tions of Fatah al-Islam mil­i­tants ear­lier today after a last-ditch escape attempt by the mil­i­tants failed. At least 35 fight­ers were killed, and about 20 oth­ers cap­tured. The leader, Shaker al-Absi, appar­ently escaped.
Cel­e­bra­tory gun­fire broke out in the north, while vil­lagers around the camp pelted the army with rice. In Beirut there’s a bit of cel­e­bra­tion and horn honk­ing.
After three months and more than 220 peo­ple killed (includ­ing 158 Lebanese sol­diers) Lebanon’s worst vio­lence since its 1975 – 1990 civil war is over. Let the fight­ing over the pres­i­dency begin.

It’s very dif­fi­cult to get accu­rate infor­ma­tion out of Iraq. Spin is the order of the day, and it’s even more dif­fi­cult when the U.S. mil­i­tary does it in the Green Zone. I’ve seen my share of that. Once, I asked an Amer­i­can trainer about the makeup of the Iraqi Army unit he was work­ing with. How many Shi’ites, Kurds, Sun­nis? “Oh, we’re about half Shi’ite and half Sunni,” he said. “It’s a great exam­ple of the two sects work­ing together.” I found this hard to believe, as this was a unit in Bagh­dad and it was about a year before the Sunni tribes had turned on Al Qaeda in Iraq and started join­ing the secu­rity forces. No Kurds? “Well, you know Kurds are mainly Sun­nis,” he replied.
What rub­bish. He knew the mes­sage of the day was Sunni and Shi’ite sit­tin’ in a tree, f-i-g-h-t-i-n-g al Qaeda together, and he was deter­mined to get it out, even if he had to push Kurds’ Sunni-ness on me. (Kurds are prob­a­bly the most sec­u­lar of all Iraqis, and their eth­nic iden­tity is what defines them to other Iraqis, not their religion.)

Con­tinue read­ing →