The Baghdad fabulist, the surge, etc.

The Fabulous Pvt. Beauchamp

THE SCRAPBOOK commends to you its favorite website, weeklystandard.com, for Michael Goldfarb's ongoing coverage of the strange career of the New Republic's Baghdad correspondent, Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp. For those who have not been following the saga, Beauchamp, hoping to become the Hemingway of the Iraq war, filed three dispatches from the front that have not stood up well under critical scrutiny. His descriptions of sadistic behavior by himself and other soldiers in his unit sparked a military investigation that concluded that his stories were false. Beauchamp himself, along with all the members of his unit, disavowed the stories to military investigators. His editors at the New Republic, at this writing, are alone in standing by their journalistic "exclusive."

While awaiting further developments, we also commend to you, in the August 27 issue of National Review, Rob Long's satirical depiction of the next chapter in the saga: Scott Thomas Beauchamp's blog, circa November 2007. A taste . . .

My New Suit

A lot of you have been asking about the new suit I was wearing on Larry King last night. Well, when I got home from Iraq--it's a long story . . . but the basic gist of it is, after my Baghdad Diarist piece for TNR was attacked for (minor) inaccuracies, I asked for and received an honorable discharge from the Army. Funnily enough, a week before I shipped back stateside, I earned a Bronze Star for an act of incredible heroism that I just totally spontaneously did at the totally perfect moment, but because I was like, you know, basically not in the Army anymore they were all, "Well, you've basically earned a Bronze Star, but we technically can't give you one so you'll just have to know that you've got one without actually having the physical thing to prove it," which was cool with me--anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the suit: so I get back to the States and it's suddenly like, Larry King, Anderson, Russert, you know the circuit, right? Plus I'm meeting like gajillions of literary agents for the book I'm writing, so I go to Bergdorf's to get a new cool suit and the one I want is almost $4,000, which is sort of a lot, I know, but my Simon & Schuster advance is way high, so I splurge. But as I'm yelling at the idiot tailor to take the pants in at the crotch, I suddenly see myself in the three-way mirror. "What have I become?" I wonder. "What has this war done to me?" I ask. And then I have to kick the tailor away from me since he's kind of messing up my view and he falls over and some of the pins he's carrying in his teeth get lodged in his throat and so I'm basically screaming with laughter and just totally cracking up as he rolls around clutching at his neck and he's blue and gurgling in pain and I'm howling and I see myself again in the mirrors and think, "Damn this damn war." . . .

We'd say Long has the voice down perfectly, though the writing may not be quite as bad as the real thing. As they say, you'll want to read the whole thing for yourself.

The Surge, in General

Is the surge working? Is life in Iraq better than it was last winter?

"Oh, yes. I think there's no doubt about that," said John Burns, the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times, to a National Public Radio interviewer on August 7. "The American troops, in general, but particularly the surge troops, the 30,000 surge troops, in the last five or six months have definitely had an effect in the areas in which they are deployed." Burns worries that 30,000 troops might not be enough, but one of the best reporters of his generation believes that the surge is working.

That is good news, of course. It gets better. It's a good week for the surge--and for the country--when even one of the harshest critics of the Iraq war has to concede that the surge is "making real progress." Those are the words of Dick Durbin of Illinois, the highest ranking Senate Democrat behind Majority Leader Harry Reid, who made the comments from Iraq in an interview with CNN. Durbin is not alone. Several other Democrats have recently given similar assessments.

Rep. Tim Mahoney, a Democrat from Florida, told a local paper that the surge "has really made a difference and really has gotten al Qaeda on their heels." His colleague Jerry McNerney from California visited Ramadi and said the U.S. military has "made quite a bit of progress here." And antiwar senators Carl Levin, Jack Reed, and Bob Casey have all acknowledged military progress in Iraq.