Seriously, guys, read his book.
A few good links:
- Switched Off in Basra: His last article, for the New York Times‘s July 31st editorial page
- The Shape of Days: Interview with Steven Vincent
Another snippet from the book (about the nomenclature of how to refer to those fighting US troops in Iraq):
Of these three descriptions, the BBC’s was the most accurate — if nothing else, the reporter captured the confusion over what to call the combatants who continue to kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Despite their VC-like stealth, are they really “guerillas”? Even though they appear to be rising up against a foreign “occupation,” do they deserve the term “insurgents?” Although they, and others, claim they are “resisting” the Coalition, does that make them a “Resistance?”
This is not mere semantics. The terms the media use to report on Iraq profoundly affect how Americans perceive this conflict and, by extension, how much blood and treasure they are willing to sacrifice on behalf of the Iraqi people. To put it another way, the degree to which America’s conception of this war remains unclear and misleading constitute victories to those who would rob the Iraqis of their future. Moral clarity is crucial in this conflict.
Unfortunately, America lost this clarity within weeks of the war’s beginning. As soon as Saddam’s statue fell in Firdousi Square, both pro- and anti-war camps accepted the notion that the U.S.-led Coalition was an “occupying” power. The term is accurate in a legal sense, of course, enshrined in international conventions and recognized by the UN, but supporters of the war should have avoided and, when confronted with it, vigorously contested its use. For there is another way of viewing the situation. Once, in a Baghdad restaurant, I overheard some Westerners and Iraqis discussing the conflict — when the Westerners asked what they thought of the “occupation,” one Iraqi retorted, “What ‘occupation’? This is a liberation.”
Words matter. By not sufficiently challenging the term “occupation,” Coalition supporters ceded critical rhetorical ground to opponents of the war, and in the process fell into a dialectical trap. Simply put, the epithet “occupation” has a negative connotation — for example, “occupied France.” Conversely, anyone who objects to being occupied and chooses to “resist” has our sympathies. (How many movies have you seen where the resistance fighters are the villans?) On an emotional level, skillfully manipulated by the Coalition’s enemies, the situation in Iraq quickly boiled down to an easily grasped, if erroneous, equation: the occupation is bad; the resistance is good.
(pp. 85-87)
