A letter from Blue Crab Boulevard’s one and only foreign correspondent. This is directly responding to a recent AP article.
A Letter to Miriam Fam
As I was flipping through the Stars and Stripes today, I came upon your article from the AP "Suicide bomber kills 40 at recruiting center"), and after reading it fairly casually, I thought to myself, "wow, that’s some scary stuff."
You see, I’m a sergeant serving with a unit that’s about to go to Iraq, and the idea of Sunnis and Shiites facing off with US troops in the middle definitely isn’t a palatable one. You also mentioned that the US may have been involved with a shooting incident in a mosque, which also registered as bad news. After reading your article, though, I flipped the page to find two other stories, both written by Stars and Stripes reporters, people who are actually in the field with the soldiers on the ground. After reading these two articles, combined with what I already know about the areas in question, I came to a simple conclusion: ma’am, you do not have the slightest clue what you’re talking about.
You see, this isn’t my first time in this particular combat zone, and some of the areas you mention I’ve actually seen in person. First, addressing the issue of the tribal violence that’s being reported, I believe your political bias has clouded your journalistic integrity. You see, if you’d done any actual research, talked to any of the grunts who patrol those areas on a daily basis, you’d know that the execution-style killings and rampant bombing isn’t being done by "Shiite militias or death squads" as you so directly put it. Many, if not most of these acts are being committed by the same people we’ve been trying to hunt down from day one of the insurgency, i.e., the foreign extremists who’ve been using Iraq as a personal playground of death and destruction. Now they’re attempting to snare the US military into a civil war whose flames they are stoking ever higher.
Next let’s discuss your report of the "mosque" shooting incident. First of all, the compound that was attacked by the joint Iraqi-US Special Forces team WAS NOT marked as a mosque. Second, the raid was aimed at breaking up a kidnapping/execution squad, you know, those wonderful people that get their jollies snatching westerners and lopping their heads off in front of cameras; it wasn’t just some door-to-door shakedown.
Lastly, the person who’s screaming the loudest about the "innocence" of the people in this so-called mosque is Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric and admitted murderer whose personal army engaged US forces in and around Najaf back in 2004. Needless to say, this man does not like us. Overall, the impression I got from your article was that the US has installed a puppet government in Iraq. You off-handedly remark that the "Shiite death squads" are likely tolerated by the local police as well as the government, which has a Shiite majority. Ma’am, if we’d had a hand in the election of Iraqi officials, do you really think we’d have allowed three dozen or so al-Sadr supporters to take office in the Iraqi parliament?
I think from now on I’ll draw my conclusions from the reports of my fellow soldiers, written by the reporters who actually live with and around them. It beats the conjured conclusions of someone sitting in a pressroom with an agenda any day.
Sincerely yours,
A US soldier
UPDATE: Thank you to Hugh Hewitt for linking here. Please do take a look around.