There's a piece by Jonathan Steele in yesterday's Media Guardian (registration required) that is interesting in a general way as an account of how difficulties for journalists in Iraq have been mounting. It's worth a read for that reason alone. But a point of more particular interest is this. For most of the article Steele just tells it in a matter-of-fact way without offering any obvious partisan judgements. It's simply: threats to, or attacks on, reporters, translators, humanitarian NGO workers; hostage-taking; and so forth. Fair enough. He's a journalist doing his job, laying out the thing as he has witnessed it.
However, right at the end in connection with Falluja - which could, he says, be a crime under international law on the part of the US - Steele does finally permit himself a couple of evaluative judgements. Here they are:
The hostage-takers are their own worst enemies, since free access to the media would probably uncover more evidence to damn the US than to exculpate it.Even-handed, don't you see? Those who take, and threaten to kill, or indeed sometimes do kill, hostages are downright imprudent; they make it harder for Western journalists to damn the US occupation, which the hostage-takers are opposing. No thought that in what the latter do there might be any issue of criminality, or even anything to damn: such as... well, hostage-taking; or obstructing the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure. Readers with long memories will be able to recall a time when the fact that this wasn't happening fast enough was the fault of the Coalition and loudly trumpeted for being so. Some of you may also be able to recall Jonathan Steele's reaction to the lynchings in Falluja, earlier in the sequence of events now unfolding there.