Iraq Churns On

3 minute read
Richard Stengel

Complex stories call for journalists who are both hardheaded and clear thinking. The story of the creation, the many near death experiences and the ultimate survival of the V-22 Osprey—a military aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and flies like an airplane—is an object lesson in how competing and often selfish interests in Washington can produce something that is not serving the interests of the American public.

Time’s Mark Thompson saw an Osprey predecessor fly in the early 1980s, and he has watched it move from blueprints to blue skies. As a Washington reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he helped expose the way Bell Helicopter and the Army failed to fix a fatal flaw in their Huey and Cobra fleets. His stories won him and the Star-Telegram a Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Thompson brings the same scrutiny to his coverage of the Osprey, exploring the compromises that have made it less capable and less safe than promised and its odd invulnerability to skeptics who have long wanted to kill the program. “Nearly 250 soldiers died before they fixed the Hueys and Cobras,” he says. “That’s a story I don’t want to write a second time.”

Iraq is the most complex story of our time, and the sad plight of Iraqi refugees as well as our government’s apparent inability to find a home for Iraqis who have helped the U.S. is an abiding shame. Our new foreign-affairs columnist, Samantha Power, tackles that subject in a moving commentary this week. Since the start of the war in 2003, more than 2.5 million Iraqis have fled their country, while 2.2 million have been displaced within Iraq’s borders. Syria alone has absorbed 1 million refugees. Sweden, which did not support the war, admitted 8,950 in 2006 alone. And the U.S.? Fewer than 1,700 since 2003.

Power, an informal, unpaid adviser to Senator Barack Obama, is uniquely equipped to think through this morality tale. She got her start in journalism in 1993 when she traveled to Bosnia after graduating from Yale to write for “anyone who would have me.” She later went to Harvard Law School, determined to write about why governments do so little in the face of atrocity. She turned her academic writing into a book called A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. It was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer and the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Not bad for something that started out as a class paper.

Truth may be the first casualty of war, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to ferret it out. That’s what Mark and Samantha have done this week.

Rick

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