CNN

CNN made an appearance in our AO this week. The fact is that their presence forced the gradual postponement of our mission. We ended up spending most of the day geared up, ready to go, waiting for the word, until the afternoon when we were finally informed that due to the logistical resources required by the presence of the journalists, our mission was postponed for two days. Nice. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

By the time we got out there, however, the piece had aired. These guys even got front page billing on CNN's website. One of the interpreters managed to capture a poor quality version of the segment, so we got to see these guys watch themselves on CNN for the first time.

My own opinion is that the video and the online article are pretty superficial puff pieces. The headline of the online article is "Soldiers wish politicians would embed with them". The reason given by a soldier interviewed in the article is so that politicians would have a better appreciations for the trials and stresses of life in the combat zone. This strikes me as largely irrelevant to the formulation of a policy, as well as somewhat disingenuous since there are a good many politicians with military and combat experience on both sides of the political divide. I would like to see politicians embed with troops for entirely different reasons. I would like them to sit and observe Neighborhood and District Advisory Councils (NAC's and DAC's) that are the new grassroots arena of civic activism in Baghdad. The squabbling and belly-aching are energetic, but nobody is shooting each other, and projects like infrastructure repair, job fairs, relief distribution, small business seminars, and medical clinics are being addressed. I would like to have the politicians go on patrols down wide boulevards that have been gutted and abandoned for months, and see the businesses that are starting to reopen. (The first time we drove through this area I thought to myself, "Man. This place looks like a war zone!" Yeah, I know. I'm an idiot.) I'd like to take them through the neighborhood we visited that was a vast, tranquil mixed population of Sunni and Shia, each with their own mosque within a block of each other, and neither guarded. The community had banded together to petition the Americans to help create a wall to keep the sectarian violence that infected neighboring communities from spilling over into their area.

To demonstrate the fragility of the progress we are witnessing, I would also take them to see the areas dominated by the Shia militias, to talk to the people first hand and see the fear in their eyes as they talk in whispers about how their Sunni friends and neighbors were driven off or executed. And to Sunni areas where al Qaeda influence is ebbing, but Sunni squatters forced from Shia neighborhoods cannot get food rations from the government, and are now facing the prospect of refugees returning to claim their homes leaving them on the streets without a roof over their heads; just the type of vulnerable population that provides al Qaeda types with plenty of raw recruits.

These are the images and stories that should provide the context that informs and elevates debate over policy. It seems to me that with all its resources, CNN squandered an opportunity in my neighborhood to inform that debate by telling a much more compelling story unfolding just blocks away.