Troops write home. Or not...

[caddyman]

Hidden away in The Times today is this rather interesting article from Washington. I've cut and paste it here since overseas readers need to pay money to get into read Mr Murdoch's organ.

UK readers can get in for free, if you think I'm making this up:

Original of Times article here.


October 14, 2003

Letters not ours, say troops
From Roland Watson in Washington


LETTERS home from the front that trumpet the nation-building achievements of US soldiers in Iraq are appearing in newspapers across America. The only wrinkle in an otherwise cheering story is that the identical letters are signed by different soldiers, some of whom say they did not sign, let alone write, them.
Their publication comes as President Bush leads a concerted drive to talk up the good news from Iraq and halt his slide in the polls through bypassing the mainstream media. At least 11 papers, most of them small-town publications, have printed the letter, which tells of the fortunes of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, which is based in Kirkuk.
“The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms,” it reads. “Children smile and run up to shake hands, and in their broken English, shout: ‘Thank you, mister’. ”
A Pentagon spokesman, citing the battalion commander, said that the soldiers had crafted the letter themselves. But six soldiers told Gannett News Service, which spotted the trend, that they had not written the letter and one said that he had not signed it. Most said that they agreed with its general thrust, but a seventh said that the first he had heard of it was when his father congratulated him on having a letter in their local paper.
Last week Mr Bush led a drive to paint a rosier picture of Iraq than that carried in the mainstream media. Mr Bush spoke of the achievements in setting up a new police force in Baghdad, something echoed in the letter from Kirkuk.
A poll published last night suggested that the publicity campaign was working. The CNN/USA Today poll put Mr Bush’s approval rating at 56 per cent — six points up over the previous month.

Are we surprised? I think not.

Comments

[keresaspa.livejournal.com]

Predictable or what? This would be the same new police force that started all those riots a week or two ago. The invasion (or "liberation" as the news insists on calling it) was always going to destabilise things and in fact has left Iraq more or less dead as a viable state. All just so Dubya could finish his father's dirty work.

ya gotta laugh aintcha

[littleonions.livejournal.com]

Its like "saving Africa from the Africans" all over again...

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

Ahh - I heard a mention of it on the radio this morning, but didn't catch then whether it was US or UK troops.

Sad thing is that I would have believed it now, despite being published on BBC & Murdoch's rags, whichever it had turned out to be.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

But six soldiers told Gannett News Service, which spotted the trend, that they had not written the letter and one said that he had not signed it.

So this means that five of them did sign it? Does this mean somebody (Do we know who? Did they ask?) circulated a letter for them to sign, but it's been represented as an individual letter from each soldier (some of whom never saw or signed it)? Or what?

It's unfortunate that anyone felt a need to misrepresent something like this when it's not that hard to get the real thing. I don't know if I've seen this particular letter or not, but the content pretty much matches with what I've generally been hearing in the news lately about what people returning from Iraq have to say, (and from my own brother-in-law the Marine; though his news is old now it was much more positive than what was being reported in the media at the time) and from blogs and online journals by soldiers in Iraq. Albeit with more self-doubt, fear, frustration with the bureaucratic structure of the armed forces, criticism of the administration, etc. Feelings about how things are going seem to fluctuate from day to day; you can check mmalicious and rebelcoyote and read back a few months for examples if you're curious. I think either one of these folks could have written a letter of unmixed hopefulness about the situation on any given day, but not every day.

It's a complex reality over there; selective perceptions seem to me to be a way of refighting the debate over the war itself, over and over again, from either side.

[captainweasel.livejournal.com]

I smell a Spin-rat

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

So this means that five of them did sign it? Does this mean somebody (Do we know who? Did they ask?) circulated a letter for them to sign, but it's been represented as an individual letter from each soldier (some of whom never saw or signed it)? Or what?

It would have been helpful if this had been made clear. Even so, if the letter was written by someone else and then signed by troops as if written personally, it still leaves a poor taste.

The problem is, that even if the average Iraqi does act like this, such a ham-fisted approach to disseminating the information immediately makes people suspicious.

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

The radio report that I caught suggeested that a fairly junior officer was to blame.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I forgot to add; I got one letter from Molly during a long period of silence when she had no lj access, and I posted part of it here. (I cut only the stuff about her new boyfriend, btw).

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Interesting letter.

Which again, only highlights the stupidity of sending out centrally written standard letters.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Well, it's so hard to believe it's not propaganda anyway, isn't it, that something like this does work to make it all the more dismissable. And yet there it is; a lot of Iraqis really do seem to be reacting this way to foreign troops. I keep thinking of those pictures of the Ukrainians welcoming the Nazi army with bouquets of flowers; that reaction wasn't about Hitler, of whom they new little or nothing, it was about Stalin. It's kind of humbling, to think how bad things really have to be to make people willing to trust an invading army over their own government.

At the same time it's obvious that Iraqis who are more hostile to the troops are hardly going to be going up to heavily armed soldiers and sharing that opinion with them, so that soldiers on the ground probably have a skewed picture of this as well. The polling data, limited as it is at this point, seem to put that group in the minority, but it certainly exists.

[keresaspa.livejournal.com]

I'd have to dispute the Ukraine thing. A lot of the Communist Party bosses in the area were Jewish and when Hitler came anti-semitism was rife so they had common ground. Huge pogroms followed the invasion and many Ukrainians were happy enough to join the Nazi movement eg at the Treblinka concentration camp where they made up 90 % of the staff. Before Hitler had ever invaded the Soviet Union Ukraine's sister state Ruthenia had a one-day independence in March 1939 until it was annexed by Hungary. After this the Ruthenian army, the Sich joined the Wermacht and took part in the invasion of Poland. Alfred Rosenberg had already been cementing Nazi support in the Ukraine well before Operation Barbarossa. In effect the Ukraine was a hot-bed of pro-Nazi sympathies. OK, they turned against Hitler, but only after the SS proved to be no different to the NKVD. A lot of the cheering and flower giving was, nonetheless, based on real pro-Nazi sentiments. It's simply more convenient to claim that it was merely anti-Stalin so as the modern country can rid itself of war guilt cheaply.