Do we even have a Broadcast News Media?

That is the question the three major cable news networks should be asking themselves.

I have given sort of veiled, whistling past the graveyard jokes, about how while Iraq seems to be in confligration, the major broadcasts networks and a good share of the print ones too, seem to be reporting on an "Alice in Wonderland" Iraq that comprises the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad.

The matter is stark and clear this morning. Saturday morning is a wasteland of television in the Attaturk household as yours truly sits in his home office and works with CNN on in the background. Like NPR at this very moment, the lead story on CNN is the granting of "quasi-pardons" to insurgents from Iyad "Six Shooter" Allawi. The CNN report is pretty much given without any context. While NPR goes on to report fierce fighting throughout numerous spots in Iraq, the CNN report barely touches upon this, while then stating that Allawi has kicked Al Jazeera out of Baghdad for thirty days.

No word on what our Iraqi Quisling did next, though it would be appropriate perhaps if he would go down to Basra and try to command the tide to recede (of course, that would be way too damn dangerous for the alleged sovereign of Iraq).

And now for my third metaphor use.

Why won't the broadcast newsmedia report on this Potempkin Political Village?

Was Wolfowitz right, albeit in the opposite direction? I think for a number of them that may be. They only report what they know, and what they know is what occurs in the confines of the Green Zone. They and the inhabitants of it are all "Stockholm Syndromers" now.

A broadcast reporter needs more than just himself to make a report, he needs his crew and its equipment. A little heavier a load, and harder to hide, than a print reporter. As a result, the broadcast media doesn't actually report accurately in Iraq, not nearly as well as the print media. But that doesn't excuse not supplementing their hide-bound reports with more substantive ones that do escape their barricaded safespot.

For example, this one from Knight Ridder:

After the past two days of fighting in southern and central Iraq, the difference between firebrand cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi couldn't be any more clear: Al Sadr has an army, and Allawi does not.

In Iraq, security is politics. When Allawi took office, the self-styled strongman lost little time before declaring that his government wouldn't tolerate the insurgency that's swept the country.

But as in previous battles, when al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia began to overrun Najaf and several neighborhoods from Baghdad to Basra, the Iraqi police force and national guard fought for a little while, then ran.

And as in previous battles, Iraq's Achilles' heel was revealed: To defend their country, Allawi and the interim government must go to the American military, an institution that's widely reviled by many Iraqis as an occupational force run amok.

And the responsibility for this, lies less in the general personality of Iraqis, than in the manner in which the occupation has been horribly planned and outrageously botched -- blame for which falls squarely upon the shoulders of our National Embarrasment:

Many in Iraq take al Sadr's popularity as a sign of the U.S. failure to provide an alternative. The militia, it seems, may not be as much a coordinated fighting force as an expression of Iraqi rage at the American presence.

"The Iraqis are frustrated by the heat, the lack of water and the lack of electricity," said Sadoun al Dulame, the head of an independent research center in Baghdad. "All that we have gotten is talk and promises, but nothing has actually been done."

In Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, there are long gas lines, a near-epidemic of typhoid and hepatitis due to poor-quality water, and an electrical grid that provides only six hours of power daily for many residents.

Adel Hamid, a vegetable merchant in Sadr City, which was named for al Sadr's late father, said that over the course of about 15 months of suffering through a lack of basic services, he'd come to see the Americans as the enemy.

"The fight will continue and (Allah willing) we will be victorious," Hamid said. "I will sacrifice my three boys for the Sadr movement; they are in the Mahdi Army now to protect the city."

SWOPA at Needlenose is on top of this, and like me, noticed something strange about Sistani's departure from Najaf suddenly yesterday for alleged heart problems (all while trampsing around in Lebanon on his feet and looking fit). This did not go unnoticed by someone particularly qualified to discuss it, Professor Suave and Debonair:

One problem with an all-out attack on the Mahdi Army was that it might endanger the life of, or meet opposition from, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He was therefore spirited out of Najaf on the pretext that he had heart problems. But Al-Zaman reports today that Sistani stopped off in Beirut on his way to London, where he met with moderate Shiite leader Nabih Berri of the AMAL party, who serves as Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament. Sistani then went on to London, but is not in hospital and won't be for at least a week. This story just does not square with him being so ill that he had to be airlifted to London for emergency heart treatment. It would not have been easy for al-Zurufi and the Americans to convince Sistani to leave, but they could have simply shared with him their plans to have an all-out war in Najaf, and told him they could not protect him. That would have left him no choice but to leave. If you think about it, he could not possibly have been gotten out of Najaf to Beirut and London without US military assistance, though he flew a private plane from Baghdad airport.

Al-Hayat reports that Sistani's reason for leaving at this juncture was to remove himself from the scene of the fighting and to lift the mantle of his authority from the Sadrist movement. It was alleged that his distance from Muqtada, always substantial, had widened further in recent weeks. Al-Hayat suspects that if Sistani has ceased trying to protect Muqtada, it could mean that a decision has been made to put an end to him.

So this is an effort at an end game with Al Sadr? Too bad the Mahdi army is growing so quickly throughout the country then. Al Sadr alive or Al Sadr dead, he's no great battle tactician, but is creating a martyr a good idea necessarily?

Things are not getting better, and Americans (if they are so inclined [Ed: good luck with that] are going to have to dig deeper than CNN, Fox, and MSNBC to get the facts on the ground over there.