IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 913-09
November 20, 2009
DoD Identifies Navy Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Brian M. Patton, 37, of Freeport, Ill., died Nov. 19 in Kuwait in a non-combat accident.

For further information related to this release, contact commander, Navy Reserve Forces Public Affairs (757) 322-5652 or Doug.Gabos@navy.mil .

And they asked me to be one of their talking heads, along with Mother Jones‘ David Corn, Mike Tomasky of the Guardian and Democracy (who was kind enough to return a casserole dish to me after nearly a year; good looking, Mike) and Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy.

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds, it’s kind of weird to see how a different news organization would report this story. I don’t think it’s correct to portray a Scott Ritter comment on CNN as somehow a factor in prompting the Eikenberry leak. And it’s way, way too simple to portray the Afghanistan debate as unfolding between military officers who want more troops and civilians who don’t. Actually, it’s not just “too simple,” it’s wrong. Clinton and Gates favor additional troops, as best I understand their positions.

But it’s a much more in-depth view of the question of media strategy than you see on cable news typically, and that’s why I like going on al-Jazeera. And not every presentation has to reflect the way I see this stuff. One of the great strengths of al-Jazeera English is how throughly they treat international policy questions. There’s a way of doing a story about leaks as pure pageantry, and they avoided that pretty much altogether. I also like the idea of opening up the segment at the end to viewer comments a great deal.

I was asked on the radio yesterday whether Iraq’s sectarian wars are really over. With all the usual caveats, I replied that I think they are. Here’s a good example of why.

Maliki arrests a prominent Awakening leader named Adil Mashhadani. There was a gun battle in Baghdad. Now Mashhadani has been sentenced to death. And this is one of the reactions:

Other Awakening leaders had mixed reactions to Mr. Mashhadani’s sentencing. “Nobody is above the law,” said Nabil Ahmed, an Awakening leader in the Adhamiya neighborhood.

You simply would not have heard that in 2006 or 2007.