Mick Hartley

Christopher Hitchens thinks war correspondents in Iraq are betting on failure:

I am not a war correspondent, though I have put in some time at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, the Commodore in Beirut, and other places of journalistic legend such as Meikles in Harare and the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. In any case, the emergence of a consensus among a press corps is something one can witness without having to duck the occasional incoming projectile. It was widely agreed in the Manchester, N.H., Sheraton in the early weeks of 1992 that Bill Clinton was a “new Democrat” and the presumptive nominee. There were very few if any Milosevic sympathizers among the Sarajevo contingent (a bias that suited me). There were no more than three Bush-Blair sympathizers in the Kuwait Hilton during the days of the “southern front” in last year’s Iraq war, and I know this because I was in that case in the minority. One doesn’t have to be an “old hand” to detect the signs of a conscience collective or, if one doesn’t care for it, a “herd mentality.”

It’s now fairly obvious that those who cover Iraq have placed their bets on a fiasco or “quagmire” and that this conclusion shows in the fiber and detail of their writing.