Iraq through the eyes of soldiers: 'a fraught project'?

An American soldier who wrote articles for The New Republic Magazine has had his articles completely retracted after months of speculation in the blogopshere and in the mainstream media about the accuracy of his accounts.

For a brief overview of the saga you can click here. But in this post I'd like to discuss the problems these events raise for milblogging.

Near the end of an article for The New Republic magazine, editor Franklin Foer says this:

"Beauchamp's writings had originally appealed to us because we wanted to publish a soldier's introspections. We still believe in this journalistic mission, especially as the number of reporters embedded in Iraq dwindles. But, as these months of controversy have shown, telling the story of what is happening in Iraq through a soldier's eyes is a fraught project. The more we dug into Beauchamp's writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment."

Although Beauchamp was publishing through a magazine, his accounts are little different in style to what you find on many milblogs. One of the advantages of the blogging phenomenon was supposed to be access to first-hand accounts without the interference of the mainstream media or other sources.

But how useful can it possibly be if the account is made up, or at best factually inaccurate, and how can we as readers spot the errors?

Beauchamp wasn't a journalist. He was surprised when the TNR came back to him and made such a fuss about whether one of the incidents he described happened in Kuwait or in Iraq. Here's what Foer said:

"...we finally had the opportunity to ask Beauchamp, without any of his supervisors on the line, about how he could mistake a dining hall in Kuwait for one in Iraq. He told us he considered the detail to be "mundane" given the far more horrific events he had witnessed. That's not a convincing explanation."

It certainly isn't. But an understandable one if you have no training. For Beauchamp, the difference between Iraq and Kuwait was negligible. For a trained journalist, it's a fundamental error - the sort any good journalist would try to completely eradicate.

Milbloggers helped bring the Beauchamp accounts down but where does it leave milblogging? How do we know that milblogs aren't filled with similar errors?

Can we rely on the milblogging community to sift out the chaff? Do we not need good, trained embedded journalists after all or are they just as error-prone as bloggers?

US blogosphere row comes to a head

Over the last few months there's been a pretty monumental battle in the US blogosphere over the authenticity of some first-hand reports from Iraq.

Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic (centre-left), has just published a massive article saying that the TNR can't stand by the stories they published written by an American soldier serving in Iraq.

In the meantime, a blog written by a former marine W. Thomas Smith Jr for the National Review Online (Conservative and critical of the TNR over the 'Scott Thomas' pieces) was exposed for some factual guesswork when reporting on Hezbollah in Lebanon. His apologia is here, and has sparked off the debate all over again.

The story begins nearly five months ago. In a piece entitled "Shock Troops" published in the TNR in July, a soldier serving in Baghdad, writing under the pseudonym 'Scott Thomas', alleged some pretty unsavoury behaviour by US troops including:

• verbally abusing a woman with facial burns at an American base.
• one private wearing the skull of an Iraqi child dug up from a mass grave on mission.
• another private careering around Baghdad in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle for no other purpose than to run over things, particularly dogs.
  

This raised several eyebrows, particularly those of Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard (centre-right). He wasn't convinced the accounts rang true. So he emailed Foer and mobilised the blogosphere to do some fact-checking:

"...we believe that the best chance for getting at the truth is likely to come from the combined efforts of the blogosphere, which has, in the past, proven adept at determining the reliability of such claims. To that end we'd encourage the milblogging community to do some digging of their own, and individual soldiers and veterans to come forward with relevant information--either about the specific events or their plausibility in general."

Various bloggers weighed in, including (to name but a few):

• The Corner
• Ace of Spades
• Blackfive
• Hot Air
• Dean Barnett
• Powerline
• Op-For
• Dadmanly
• Haft of the Spear
• Badgers Forward

And so did the mainstream media. Here's a piece by Howard Kutz in the Washington Post for example.

The row's bubbled away ever since. TNR decided to get Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of First Infantry Division to reveal his identity proving he was a serving soldier. But for his trouble the Army cut off all contact between TNR and Beauchamp as they carried out an internal investigation.

The fact that 'Scott Thomas' was a real soldier didn't halt the criticisms. The TNR tried to sort out some of the key facts promising to re-report every detail, but, after months of work, concluded that some of the facts in the stories could not be verified and that some of them were simply incorrect.

Now the accounts of W. Thomas Smith Jr writing on a blog called The Tank are under scrutiny.

The arguments over authenticity and accuracy have been hijacked on both sides for political purposes with right and left exchanging blows over whether the NRO or the TNR is more at fault, less patriotic, or less journalistically and ethically sound.

For more, see the New York Times's and the Washington Post's take on events.