WHAT WILL RICK ATKINSON COVER NOW?

I'm just wondering. Because it seems to me that it will be odd if, despite his reknown as a war reporter, the Post will let him cover anything remotely relevant to the war with Iraq. Given that's he now been courteous enough (I'm not being sarcastic; I think it is a courtesy) to tell us that he opposed the war before, during, and after.

It's courteous because knowing a reporter's attitudes on such a question help us better understand their reporting. (So I have to wonder if Atkinson was kind enough to share this information with his readers prior to embedding with a unit to cover the war for the Post.)

After all, this is not a passing or casual or purely intellectual thing with him. He says: "I have no mixed feelings about the hundreds of dead soldiers — it was a poor use of their lives. I was certain last March that we as a nation had not done all we could to make sure lives were not lost, but I'm dogmatic about it now."

And he has a pretty strong opinion on what comes next:

So what can newspaper correspondents do now? Wars that last as long as this one inevitably become "corrupt," Atkinson said. "Even righteous wars corrupt soldiers and documenting that is one of the responsibilities of reporters. A more concerted effort to watch this inevitable process of corruption is a hard, but an important, task."

Having stated such an opinion so boldly and explicitly, how could the Post let him cover the war now? Surely he is entitled to his opinion and to write about his opinion in the pages of books. But to write straight news after basically announcing that he anticipates our military will become "corrupt" -- meaning untrustworthy -- does not suggest that he would approach such work with complete open-mindedness.

Does it?

Comments

[Leon]

Sounds like the reporter is "corrupt," whatever he means by that, not the military. What bothers me the most about his statement is that he believes it is inevitable, no matter what, even in righteous wars. But I'm betting in his mind there is no such thing as a righteous war. There is no way that he can be a credible reporter on this topic. Time to send him to the local crime beat...oh wait, "even righteous arrests corrupt the police."

[John Cunningham]

Sounds to me as though Atkinson is not anti-war, but anti-American. If we followed his view, and refrained from any way [since it would soon be corrupt] then sooner or later the war will come to us. If had moral consistency, he would quit doing news reporting and take a post on the editorial page. Or, he could just go to work for al-Jazeera. They too see the war as a corrupt enterprise.
Atkinson reminds me of the old saw that a liberal is a guy who won't even take his own side in a fight. If his view had prevailed in the 1940s, he would either be speaking German, or be a lampshade.

[IceCold]

Wish he'd share the basis of his dogma. Otherwise, I'll just have to continue to regard him as a superficial and lazy observer, who also doesn't understand the purpose of militaries and national security policy: not avoiding all fights at any cost, but at ensuring security. Come on, Rick, let us in on the secret -- what magic policy eschewed by the evil "neocons" would have ended the intolerable existing and potential threat posed by the Iraqi regime, a year ago and after the (impending) formal end of all (ineffectual, post-9/11) "containment"? (sound of crickets chirping .....)

He was one of the contributors to the preposterous WaPo article that kicked off the short-lived "long war, quagmire, stuff we didn't expect" panic among the usual clueless elements during the March sandstorm. That should have been mortifying enough to send him off to continue work on the WWII book trilogy, the first part of which I got 1/3 the way through before the lack of punch and the annoying prose style bogged me down in a "quagmire" of my own.

I'm all for clear-eyed reporting on "corruption," inevitable or not, but just make it more believable than the often laughable military analysis we've been provided in the past.