War is the Continuation of Journalism
<p>StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now <a href='http://strategypage.com/fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=IRAQ.HTM'>using<br />
press credentials as cover</a>.  Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested<br />
after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now<br />
protesting that this was an error.</p>
<p>Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this<br />
is bleakly funny.  Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could<br />
earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not?<br />
After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective<br />
&mdash; the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.</p>
<p>Watch the aftermath closely.  If (as seems not unlikely) there were<br />
Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see<br />
Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general<br />
grounds that actually <em>shooting</em> Americans jeopardizes the<br />
customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks<br />
on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing.  The<br />
anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue &mdash;<br />
in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled<br />
the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.</p>
<p>In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of<br />
America&#8217;s own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and<br />
loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George<br />
W. Bush.  They&#8217;ll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists<br />
condemning the U.S. as a &lsquo;rogue state&rsquo; and U.S. policies as<br />
terrorism, while refusing to use the word &lsquo;terrorist&rsquo; for<br />
Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.</p>
<p>Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete<br />
a drama that has previously been abstract.  Today&#8217;s war on terror is<br />
not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a<br />
confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West<br />
itself.  The disease is Julien Benda&#8217;s <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200211#82'>trahison<br />
des clercs</a> and all its sequelae.  And Reuters, marching in step<br />
with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of<br />
the West&#8217;s enemies.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been<br />
released.  This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is<br />
pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side.<br />
As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word &#8220;terrorist&#8221;<br />
to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.</p>
