SPIN WATCH

Beware reporting by those who so desperately want to equate Iraq with Somalia or Vietnam. The tend to get it wrong.

Confusion swirled Monday as a U.S. military official retracted his earlier report that the throats of two U.S. soldiers had been slashed during an attack on Sunday in the northern city of Mosul.

The official, who said he was receiving his information from written military reports, said the two soldiers had died of gunshot wounds to the head, and that their bodies had been pulled from their car by Iraqis and robbed of their personal belongings. He said that, contrary to some news service accounts Sunday from Mosul, the bodies of the men had not been mutilated or pummeled with rocks.

The gruesome initial accounts had been seized upon by cable news channels and tabloid newspapers as a virtual replay of the 1993 attack in which the bodies of U.S. soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. That attack, popularized in the movie "Blackhawk Down," was seen as one of the principal reasons the United States quit its military operation intended to bring order to the Somali capital.

In Monday's account, the military official said the victims, both soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, were not set upon by a mob but were shot by unidentified gunmen who stopped their car in front of the Americans' car, forcing it to halt. The assailants got out and fired at the Americans through the windshield.


Another Army truism here applies: Initial reports are always wrong.

And how far wrong tends to be a function of just how sensational such reports are. Consider how wrong the initial reports of PFC Lynch's combat heroics were.