Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Forty-nine days after the launch of Operation Cavalry Charge on March 25, the New York Times finally gets around to sending a couple of reporters down to Basra--to Iraq's second largest city--to give its readers a first hand account on the situation there. What the reporters saw was overwhelmingly positive, and even though the British commanders in Basra try to take undue credit on the sly, the article is for the most part accurate.

It should be noted that the NYTimes had covered Basra extensively for the last seven weeks, and the events there often made it to the front-page of that publication; the tone had been uniformly negative and sensationalist. Yet, the reporters writing-up the events never bothered to make it to Basra but were rather sitting hundreds of miles away in Baghdad, and it was only now that the paper's editors chose to send a couple of journalists to gauge Basra's reality.

This was yet another shameful chapter in how the Iraq story was reported and what is even more shameful is that no one will be held accountable for all the distortion and misrepresentation it has left in its wake.

UPDATE:

Who's running the New York Times this week? Because they've got a great Op-Ed by Edward Luttwak about Obama's apostacy in Muslim eyes. I had raised the same points back in December.