EXPLODING THE MYTHOLOGY

MUCH of the discourse on Iraq continues to be dominated by myths - provable falsehoods that happen to confirm the prejudices of the antiwar crowd and/or those disposed to think our mission is failing now.
The mythos now culminates in the notion that a patriotic Iraqi "resistance" is slowly gaining ground against a hated occupation. But the distortions go back much farther.

Here is Stephen Walt - a dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government! - writing in the Financial Times: "The Iraqi people did not welcome U.S. forces with open arms and garlands and flowers."

In fact, the Iraqis did welcome us as liberators. I know, because I was there...

Now, in a passionately angry interview for a new anthology of war reporting, exerpted in Editor and Publisher magazine (titled "There is Corruption In Our Business"), Burns makes public his contempt for fellow members of the Baghdad press corps who failed to tell the truth about the Saddam regime.

He writes, "This place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil."

Burns' insistence on this point, if he is heard, must explode the mythology: Iraqis are not much worse off now than before the war because of a breakdown in law and order.

Life under Saddam was hell for vast numbers of Iraqis. Reportorial nostalgia for the orderly days of the former dictator is analagous to the old lament that "at least under Mussolini, the trains ran on time" - and it is just as morally reprehensible.

The Iraq war was an astonishing military success. The current troubles, while real, are being grossly misrepresented. This matters. But understanding the situation is going to be much harder if reporters collude in constructing myths that reflect their own political prejudices.