The Other Quagmire in Iraq

The Other Quagmire in Iraq

By: Rachel Marsden

This week, CNN's Larry King Live featured a group of people discussing and defending their cause, and their fallen colleagues in Iraq.

One woman credited her two recently injured male cohorts with paving the way for women like herself to do the same job. This, even as a kidnapping video featuring a female colleague was playing in heavy rotation on Al-Jazeera TV.

When King confronted another of these seasoned professionals -- one who had spent time in Vietnam -- with the fact that their death toll in Iraq was creeping upward, the pro shrugged it off as part of the job. He called associates who had been involved in the London Blitz and a fatal sniper incident in the Pacific models for his generation.

Yet another high-profile representative of this group called the situation in Iraq a "spiralling security disaster" that "just gets worse and worse," but argued that their presence is imperative, even at "enormous personal cost to us, our families."

As a conservative watching this show, it was impossible not to finally see the light: These people are clearly in a massive, Vietnam-style quagmire over there, with a death toll rapidly approaching that of the U.K. forces.

It would appear that many are only there because they are brainwashed, as evidenced by various studies showing that they vote overwhelmingly for one particular U.S. party.

They have been callously sent into these deadly war zones at the insistence of their commanders -- ultimately in the name of profit. One such superior even referred to the families of two seriously injured men as having been "assigned" -- in the same way that their injured loved ones were.

Their involvement with the Abu Ghraib "Beach-Blanket-Bingo-in-the-Buff" prisoner "abuse" affair has ensured that many around the world will always view that event in a similar moral light as Saddam Hussein's torture, rape and killing sprees. Good job, guys.

So, is it the troops to whom I'm referring here? God, no. I'm talking about the journalists covering this war -- many of whom seem to be confused as to who the real enemy is.

CNN's chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, calls the capture of journalist Jill Carroll "sad" because "she has devoted her life to understanding the Iraqis. She dresses a lot like them ... And she has tried to do her best to understand the situation."

Newsflash: Terrorists aren't going to check for your "Michael Moore Movie of the Month Club" card before they light you up like a Roman Candle or chop off your head.

Bush is in Iraq for a reason and a cause. And now Amanpour has revealed why journalists are there, too: "Because if we're not, whose word are we going to take for it? Are we going to take the Pentagon-paid Lincoln Group who are paying [sic] positive stories to be written in the Iraqi press? Are we going to take what the administration tells us?"

Rather than focusing on Bush as the enemy and pushing the Vietnam-style hellhole thesis, maybe Amanpour and her colleagues can make themselves useful. They should head over to Syria and start digging, in light of Iraqi General Georges Sada's new book, Saddam's Secrets, in which he details how the dictator's weapons of mass destruction were moved to Syria -- apparently not unlike the black market dispersal of the Soviet Union's post-Cold War arsenal.

And take our CBC TV guys with you, as Canada's contribution to this important cause -- because if they're as good at zeroing in on WMD as they are with those ridiculous pore-probing extreme close-up shots of conservative interviewees, then they should be able to find that stash in no time.

PUBLISHED: TORONTO SUN (February 2/06)