George Packer has an amazing new article, "Over Here:Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction", in the winter issue of the World Affairs Journal. It's a stunning reminder of the ambiguity and complexity of war as well as a rebuke of the ideologues on both sides who have projected their own simplistic worldviews onto the conflict.
In his article, Packer speculates that the names of Iraq's best reporters will never gain the recognition their brethren did in Vietnam. But with this short piece, coming as it does on the heels of his play Betrayed and his incisive account of the US experience in Iraq, The Assassin's Gate, George Packer has proved he is a worthy spokesman for that scarcest of war commodities, the truth. That trait alone should separate him (alongside others such as Thomas E. Ricks) from the faceless mass of opportunistic commentators who stoop to call themselves "journalists". America could use the reporting of a few more George Packers.
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