a shaker of salt

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers exposes the limits of even the best reporting. Here’s what the reader wrote to Sullivan:

The New Yorker report you cited is so bad it is scary. If this is what you are reading to figure out what is going then you need a better source. This article is riddled with incorrect facts and easements. It doesn’t just get things sorta wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong.

Unfortunately I can’t go through every part of the article, because much of what I would say is classified. I’ll just comment on the part you quoted from a Sheikh Zaidan. Sheikh Zaidan is not a “prominent Sunni tribal leader” at all. Actually, he is a nobody with no tribal power or constituency who probably isn’t even a Sheikh and who is likely still involved with the insurgency. The insurgency has been beaten so bad in Anbar that he is forced to cool his rhetoric. Of course they didn’t make us “crawl on our stomachs”. What happened was, we were killing insurgents like it was cool and the insurgents were killing Iraqis like it was cool. The tribes realized they were getting wiped out at both ends.

For what it’s worth: I believe that the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson got and told the best story he could get, and could tell. But his understanding of the terrain and the larger context—his template, if you will—cannot compete with what is known by readers like Sullivan’s, who are on the ground.

It’s not that one storyteller is right and the other is wrong. Without Anderson’s template, it’s impossible for us to get a handle on a situation that for New Yorker readers is completely alien. Without the corrections to Anderson’s template offered by Sullivan’s reader, we cannot go deeper into the reality of facts on the ground.

The real problem isn’t whom to believe, however. The real problem is that people just aren’t that into finding out the truth about Iraq. They’re into political warfare at home.