Shadid Its Pretty Bad Here

Shadid: “It’s Pretty Bad Here.”

It isn’t often that one gets to hear a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist speak in his own voice from the field, but that’s what you get at the Washington Post with the Tony Shadid question and answer session. Shadid is one of the best, and being an Arabist with long experience in the region has served him very well.

A taste:

‘ Anthony Shadid: This is my own opinion, but I think it’s pretty bad here. From my own experience, we’re dealing with the greatest insecurity since the fall of Saddam. Is it a crisis? It feels that way. Can the U.S. administration recover? Probably. But you definitely hear Iraqis calling for a decisive change in the approach — perhaps less of a military response, more of a political one, and a greater reliance on Iraqi voices than those embodied by the Governing Council. ‘