A bit of shameless self-promotion

The editors of the Columbia Journalism Review are critical of the coverage our Potemkin press corps in America of the issues surrounding the Iraq War:  Drilling Down: How the press can keep the debate about Iraq honest Jan/Feb 2006.

Much of the information and expertise necessary to tease out these and other questions will not be found anywhere near the White House, or Congress for that matter. It resides in places where too few journalists are habituated to look: in the military- and security-related research institutes housed at universities, in think tanks, and within the military itself.

Consider a single example: the report published last October by the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, entitled “Precedents, Variables, and Options in Planning a U.S. Military Disengagement Strategy from Iraq.” The title is clunky, but the sixty-seven-page report is a detailed and sobering exploration of everything from the question of how to achieve political stability in Iraq to the plausible ways to define victory there. The authors explain the historically problematic process of carrying out an exit strategy following military intervention, the dismal record of international attempts to impose democracy, and the difficulty of measuring the political legitimacy of a new government. They conclude that while it remains possible for the U.S. to devise an exit strategy that leaves both the U.S. and Iraq better off than before the invasion, “remarkably little room exists for error, ideological dogmatism, or ignorance about the nature of the multiple problems associated with such an undertaking.”

It is a rich trove to mine for story ideas, yet we have found no references to the report in the mainstream press, lending even more resonance to the charge, made in its foreword, that the issue of an exit strategy “has been oversimplified in many of the current media debates. Often, political commentators of various stripes reduce complex arguments and multidimensional planning problems to simple slogans suggesting that victory is either inevitable or impossible.” (my emphasis)

But the particular "market niche" for such information is not going entirely unserved.  The mainstream press may have ignored it.  But regular readers of Old Hickory's Weblog saw it discussed here back on 10/13/05.

And apparently the CJR editors' Lexus-Nexus search (or however they searched) didn't notice the mention of the paper in the San Francisco Chronicle that was linked here on 12/12/05.  That post also links to other related material.