The Baghdad fabulist, the surge, etc.

The Fabulous Pvt. Beauchamp

THE SCRAPBOOK commends to you its favorite website, weeklystandard.com, for Michael Goldfarb's ongoing coverage of the strange career of the New Republic's Baghdad correspondent, Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp. For those who have not been following the saga, Beauchamp, hoping to become the Hemingway of the Iraq war, filed three dispatches from the front that have not stood up well under critical scrutiny. His descriptions of sadistic behavior by himself and other soldiers in his unit sparked a military investigation that concluded that his stories were false. Beauchamp himself, along with all the members of his unit, disavowed the stories to military investigators. His editors at the New Republic, at this writing, are alone in standing by their journalistic "exclusive."

While awaiting further developments, we also commend to you, in the August 27 issue of National Review, Rob Long's satirical depiction of the next chapter in the saga: Scott Thomas Beauchamp's blog, circa November 2007. A taste . . .

My New Suit

A lot of you have been asking about the new suit I was wearing on Larry King last night. Well, when I got home from Iraq--it's a long story . . . but the basic gist of it is, after my Baghdad Diarist piece for TNR was attacked for (minor) inaccuracies, I asked for and received an honorable discharge from the Army. Funnily enough, a week before I shipped back stateside, I earned a Bronze Star for an act of incredible heroism that I just totally spontaneously did at the totally perfect moment, but because I was like, you know, basically not in the Army anymore they were all, "Well, you've basically earned a Bronze Star, but we technically can't give you one so you'll just have to know that you've got one without actually having the physical thing to prove it," which was cool with me--anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the suit: so I get back to the States and it's suddenly like, Larry King, Anderson, Russert, you know the circuit, right? Plus I'm meeting like gajillions of literary agents for the book I'm writing, so I go to Bergdorf's to get a new cool suit and the one I want is almost $4,000, which is sort of a lot, I know, but my Simon & Schuster advance is way high, so I splurge. But as I'm yelling at the idiot tailor to take the pants in at the crotch, I suddenly see myself in the three-way mirror. "What have I become?" I wonder. "What has this war done to me?" I ask. And then I have to kick the tailor away from me since he's kind of messing up my view and he falls over and some of the pins he's carrying in his teeth get lodged in his throat and so I'm basically screaming with laughter and just totally cracking up as he rolls around clutching at his neck and he's blue and gurgling in pain and I'm howling and I see myself again in the mirrors and think, "Damn this damn war." . . .

We'd say Long has the voice down perfectly, though the writing may not be quite as bad as the real thing. As they say, you'll want to read the whole thing for yourself.

The Surge, in General

Is the surge working? Is life in Iraq better than it was last winter?

"Oh, yes. I think there's no doubt about that," said John Burns, the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times, to a National Public Radio interviewer on August 7. "The American troops, in general, but particularly the surge troops, the 30,000 surge troops, in the last five or six months have definitely had an effect in the areas in which they are deployed." Burns worries that 30,000 troops might not be enough, but one of the best reporters of his generation believes that the surge is working.

That is good news, of course. It gets better. It's a good week for the surge--and for the country--when even one of the harshest critics of the Iraq war has to concede that the surge is "making real progress." Those are the words of Dick Durbin of Illinois, the highest ranking Senate Democrat behind Majority Leader Harry Reid, who made the comments from Iraq in an interview with CNN. Durbin is not alone. Several other Democrats have recently given similar assessments.

Rep. Tim Mahoney, a Democrat from Florida, told a local paper that the surge "has really made a difference and really has gotten al Qaeda on their heels." His colleague Jerry McNerney from California visited Ramadi and said the U.S. military has "made quite a bit of progress here." And antiwar senators Carl Levin, Jack Reed, and Bob Casey have all acknowledged military progress in Iraq.

This is a dramatic change. In April, Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: "I believe . . . that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week." Reid said this, of course, before all the troops being surged into Iraq had even arrived.

So if Reid was wrong, if his colleagues now believe that the surge--just two months old--is accomplishing something, then surely these Democrats are prepared to give General David Petraeus and his troops more time build on this momentum. If we have a chance to win the war, we'll take it, right? Well, no.

The problem, you see, is the Iraqi government. While things in Iraq are going much better militarily, the Democrats say, the lack of political progress means it is time for U.S. troops to come home. The Iraqi government is gridlocked, unable to accomplish anything because of irreconcilable differences between parties and interest groups. (If that sounds like Washington, well, pay no mind.) Two years ago, some of the same Democrats had different reasons to pull out. They cited the inability of the Iraqis to write a constitution or to form a government. Now that the Iraqis have accomplished these things, it's their inability to write an oil law. And when they finally pass an oil law? We're sure there will be some reason to declare defeat and get out.

And the View from Germany

It doesn't surprise us in the least that this week's cover of the German magazine Der Spiegel features Iraq and the ominous headline "Bagdad Babylon." After all, Germany's equivalent of Time specializes in anti-American doom-and-gloom, running such covers as "Bush's Vietnam," a blindfolded Statue of Liberty, and an American soldier beneath the words Der endlose Blitzkrieg. But what did surprise us was the interview with Spiegel reporter Ullrich Fichtner who spent the last three weeks in Iraq and provided an assessment of the situation on the ground. Fichtner described Baghdad as having serious problems, lamented the sectarian strife, and noted some 600 executions occurring each month.

Does that mean things are only worsening? Nein. "One can say that much of the north, Kurdistan, and also the rural regions around Baghdad are no longer a war zone." In his online chat, Fichtner tells Spiegel that the extremists are failing to win the support of the people in large parts of the country and that he saw Iraqis and Americans embracing each other. He describes the troops as "in a surprisingly good mood" and guesses that maybe one-third of the soldiers in Iraq were at one point stationed in Germany--the reporter had many conversations with American GIs about bratwurst, beer, Oktoberfest, and Black Forest cake.

As for the Iraqi people, "most of the encounters I had were friendly and I was welcomed." Fichtner's hope, explains Der Spiegel, is that people will not be "blinded" by new pictures they may see of bomb attacks, but rather come to the understanding "that in Iraq, a successful future is possible."

How do you say "unbelievable" in German?