Looking through the coverage of the Blackwater story yesterday morning, I stumbled across the AP’s take, and it would be hard to find a less thorough accounting of recent history if you tried. The AP claims that “the 2004 battle of Fallujah — an unsuccessful military assault in which an estimated 27 U.S. Marines were killed, along with an unknown number of civilians — was retaliation for the killing, maiming and burning of four Blackwater guards in that city by a mob of insurgents.”
While technically true, the AP omits a pretty good chunk of recent history. I assume that the AP is referring to the first battle for Fallujah in April 2004, and not the second, bigger battle (which was a success, and which the AP seems to have forgotten about) in November of that year. I’ll give the AP that there were twenty-seven Americans killed in the first battle, but seventy-one more were killed in November battle–not something to gloss over when you’re talking about Fallujah.
Claiming that the death of the contractors was the sole reason for the fight also sells the complexities of the battle short. The death and mutilation of the four Americans in March was a big reason for the April battle, (though hardly the only one), but by November, the time of the bigger, more decisive–and more successful–fight, there were bigger fish to fry. Over the summer, the city had been taken over by insurgents, and by the fall, was thought to house many insurgent and al Qeada in Iraq leaders, which was–for obvious reasons–unacceptable to the American military leadership in Iraq.
I realize that the AP reporter only had so much time, and space, to mention the death of the Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, but to mention the first fight in April, without qualifying that there was a much larger and more successful fight in November, sells the memories of both battles short.
And that’s not even all that the facts that the AP skirted yesterday. The Washington Post ran an AP story on page sixteen that quoted a guy that most likely doesn’t even exist. The Weekly Standard‘s Aaron MacLean caught the goof in which the wire service quoted Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the “leader of the Islamic State of Iraq” calling for the killing of a Swedish cartoonist who had “depicted the Prophet Muhammad with body of a dog.”
Only problem is, according to the American military, and the New York Times, “the elusive Mr. Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose declarations on audiotape were read by a man named Abu Abdullah al-Naima.” We found this out back in July but apparently no one let the AP know, since they fail to mention this in their story. It was quite a day for the good old AP. Maybe they should start reading the news, before reporting it.
