Fog of war invades game of telephone!
Jeff Jarvis suggests that I am on the garbled end of a game of telephone or "teleclick" in my post about the battle of Samarra below -- and that I'm deriving "Vietnam nostalgia" in the process, to boot. Then Glenn Reynolds nods approvingly. It sounds good, but Jeff is completely misreading my post.
My question -- "54 Saddam loyalists dead? Or American soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians?" -- wasn't derived in a tag-team hand-off from Cole to Marshall to me; it's a question that lies at the very heart of the conflicting accounts of the event itself, as summarized in the New York Times story I linked to at the very start of my post (and that Jarvis links to as well): "Accounts of a three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets of Samarra on Sunday diverged radically, with Iraqis saying only eight people had been killed, several of them civilians." It is the question about this still-hard-to-read event, and one does not have to wear Vietnam-colored glasses to ask it. My point remains: Our leadership would have a lot more credibility in these situations if it hadn't racked up such an awful record in the past.
So Jeff misunderstands or distorts my post, and Glenn applauds. Who's playing telephone, again?
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