Kerry Cheered In Baghdad?

You often hear about the blurring of opinion and reporting in the media, but how about “reality based“ vs. “just make stuff up” reporting. This is the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle today - Kerry cheered in Baghdad, decries Bush team's 'blunders.'


You can read reports covering the Senator’s trip to Iraq from the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Agence France-Presse and even the San Francisco Chronicle’s own piece and you’ll not see find a single reference to anyone cheering. True enough, you’ll find many references to Kerry “decrying” Bush’s “blunders”, but cheering – who in the heck are we suppose to believe was cheering? U.S. soldiers, throngs of Iraqi people, the terrorist and insurgents or maybe just a small group of reporters?


Anyway, we hope Kerry is booed in Boston when he returns home. His remarks in Iraq show a complete lack of judgment and leadership in time of war. Just one more instance of grandstanding by a U.S. Senator. Excerpts below.

Sen. John Kerry arrived in Baghdad yesterday for a two-day, on-the-ground assessment of the situation in Iraq. He was scheduled to meet with U.S. diplomats, intelligence officials and military commanders; senior members of the interim government; and Sunni and Shiite Muslim political figures.

Kerry also met with about 20 soldiers based in his home state and was approached by several U.S. soldiers to pose for photographs and sign T-shirts while he was eating in a hotel restaurant.Kerry asked the soldiers what he should tell Congress about the war in Iraq and was told that "the good work that they are doing is not getting reported in the United States."

During a meeting with reporters Kerry attacked what he called the "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders" of the Bush administration. The mistakes, he said, included former U.S. occupation leader Paul Bremer's decisions to disband the Iraqi army and purge the government of former members of Hussein's Baath Party. Both moves are widely believed to have fueled the largely Sunni insurgency.

"What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning," he said. "And the job has been made enormously harder."

"No insurgency is defeated by conventional military power alone," he said. "Look at the IRA," the Irish Republican Army, which fought a decades long guerrilla war against the British in Northern Ireland before a Catholic- Protestant power-sharing government was put in place. "It was defeated by a combination of time and political negotiation."

"Mistakes have been made," he said. "Now it's a different time and different set of judgments that need to be made. I need to understand it, so I can make the judgments. That's why I'm here, to see and hear firsthand what the dynamics are."

"But we are at war, and I think you can't really make all the judgments that you need to make without digging in."