Remembering Iraq

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 21st of March, 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up, remembering the war in Iraq.

Yesterday marked 20 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein. Over the course of the eight-year conflict, more than 4,000 U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed.

EICHER: Last week the Senate voted to repeal two measures that gave the U.S. government open-ended approval for military action in Iraq.

TIM KAINE: We will start the first procedural steps to formally end the Iraq War.

EICHER: That’s Senator Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat. A bipartisan group in the Senate is working to revoke the A-U-M-F, that’s the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the legal basis for the Iraq War.

KAINE: Right now, we still have not one but two active war authorizations against the government of Iraq that is no longer an enemy. But in the biblical phrase, we've beaten the sword into a plowshare. Iraq is now a strategic partner of the United States.

EICHER: WORLD Opinions contributor William Inboden was a member of the National Security Council at the White House during the Iraq War, and I’m going to quote from an article he wrote for us this week.

He says “the enormous costs and errors of the war are well-known, [but] the costs of inaction should not be ignored. Had Saddam Hussein been left in power, he had every intention of restarting his weapons of mass destruction program, and continuing to menace the region as well as the United States.”

REICHERD: “This is not to say that the war was worth the terrible price,” Inboden goes on. “But rather to remind us of the tragic dimension of statecraft. In our fallen world, with imperfect information, few policy choices are clear or cost-free.”

EICHER: What does this mean for today, on the 20th anniversary of the war? Inboden reminds us we “should begin with gratitude for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who served. Some of them supported [the war], others did not, but all willingly answered the call to service.”

REICHERD: Well, joining us today to talk about some of those soldiers is Lee Pitts…better known to us as the Executive Director of the World Journalism Institute. Before he became a journalism professor at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, Lee was a reporter for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, embedded in Iraq. Lee, good morning.

LEE PITTS, GUEST: Good morning.

REICHARD: Well Lee, why did you go to Iraq, and what was the state of the war at the time?

PITTS: Yeah, sure. So it was the fall of 2004. When I first headed out to Iraq via Kuwait and how I got that assignment was I'd been covering for most of the summer and fall, these are going away ceremonies for these the soldiers who are who are being activated and deployed overseas. I did enough of those and kept showing up that eventually one of the colonels in charge of some of the military units in that area said Hey, you, why don't you come to come with us on one of these units to one of these units to Iraq. And so I said, Yes, and embarked on a seven month adventure with a regimental combat team based out of Tennessee and spent time with them and the Diablo province of Iraq, which is in the northeastern part of Iraq, about 90 minutes from Baghdad near the Iranian border.

REICHARD: What was at stake security-wise, and how did the public feel about it?

PITTS: Yeah, well, the I mean, wasn't a, a safe place. You couldn't go wandering around any part of Iraq, including our part without, you know, Kevlar vest and helmet and Humvees and Bradley, five vehicles and so on. So there's definitely it was, it was a hot zone for sure. One of the interesting things about my embedded experience is that I was embedded on the ground with these soldiers. And my assignment was just follow them around in Iraq and spend time with them on their missions. It was about 4000 Soldiers from a regimental combat team. I was telling one part of a larger story, and that part was these the soldiers and what what I remember most about is not really the combat missions, although there were, you know, you know, ambushes and night raids, and snatch-and-grab missions. But what I remember the most is the humanitarian missions to these impoverished places like that, where they were trying to deliver things like flip flops and, and water and even even soccer balls to the villages, they would get these, these boxes of flip flops and soccer balls and so on shipped to them from people back home, readers back home, actually, we would write these stories about these poor villages, and then the readers would respond by sending boxes of things home and I have vivid memories of pulling up in convoy of Humvees and coming out and tossing out soccer balls and the whole area kind of going crazy, you know, raising their hands as for soccer balls are asking for for flip flops. I remember that more than even the instances of combat. And I think that's what it was. It was more of a you know, I wouldn't call it just a war I call it a mix of war and humanitarian. and community building was was a big thing often kind of modeling to the villages they were in charge of overseeing how a democracy could work.

REICHARD: What did the war change, and how has public opinion about it shifted over 20 years?

PITTS: Yeah, well, you know, when anytime, again going back to what I was saying earlier about house so folks with the soldiers, even when we were in Iraq, there was controversy about should we be there should we be more in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction debate you know, and I felt like my job as a reporter on the ground in Iraq with the soldiers was to chronicle the rough draft of history of their experiences and what they would say to me to them to a man and woman to a soldier there was that you know, we should be here this is important mission that we're here and we're going to you know, do the missions are best for our ability and and it was the way I interpreted that was that the you know, it had to it had to be the case for them because they are away from their families. They were there basically sacrificing a year of their lives a year their their family life that year, their professional life a year that just their community life back home, and it wouldn't make any sense you couldn't sleep at night if you were given up that year for for nothing or for something that that was you know, inaccurate, intelligent saying we shouldn't have been there. So they, they really, they really embraced that narrative of, you know, we're glad to be here we need to be here and this an important mission.

REICHARD: As you think about this week’s anniversary, what is one thing you learned about covering the Iraq War that you’ll never forget?

PITTS: Yeah, well, I think, you know, I learned that the journalism is best done, you know, outside of a newsroom, you know, being being present with whatever beat you’re on. You know, going out with the people you're covering and spending time with them going on their missions. My job was to go out there on the missions with them and kind of see it firsthand and write my stories that way. And I think that's what makes journalism fun and what makes journalism important, and even in this era of technology, and an email interviews and and, and zoom interviews, I think we shouldn't lose that. As journalists and storytellers and go on the missions of your beat.

REICHARD: Well, Lee has a lot more stories from his time in Iraq, and he shares many of them in his teaching at the WORLD Journalism Institute. So if you are a college-aged aspiring journalist and you haven’t yet applied to the 2023 WJI, let this be your invitation to get started. The web address is w-j-i-dot-world, and the deadline is March 31, just ten days away.

Lee, thank you for your time today.

PITTS: Thank you for having me.

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