Listening Now

I would have placed Soldiers in Iraq Say Pullout Would Have Devastating Results by Josh White at least on the bottom of page 1, where the Post instead runs a Style-worthy puff piece, Need To Reach Mark Plotkin? Still, on A13, they published it:

For the U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, the war is alternately violent and hopeful, sometimes very hot and sometimes very cold. It is dusty and muddy, calm and chaotic, deafeningly loud and eerily quiet.

The one thing the war is not, however, is finished, dozens of soldiers across the country said in interviews. And leaving Iraq now would have devastating consequences, they said.

With a potentially historic U.S. midterm election on Tuesday and the war in Iraq a major issue at the polls, many soldiers said the United States should not abandon its effort here. Such a move, enlisted soldiers and officers said, would set Iraq on a path to civil war, give new life to the insurgency and create the possibility of a failed state after nearly four years of fighting to implant democracy.

It's getting some buzz but mainly on the center-right; Blue Crab Boulevard, Captain's Quarters, Patterico, Blackfive, Iowa Voice  and WuzzaDem are current examples. Perhaps somebody at the Post peeked outside the cocoon and noticed all the griping about failing to report--at all--what soldiers thought about John Kerry's gaffe, a situation that allowed Howard Kurtz to say There isn't anybody, including in the Bush administration, who believes that Kerry meant to insult the soldiers in Iraq with his clumsy joke. At that time the Post still hadn't run the priceless Halp Us Jon Carry photo. The photo finally appeared in Sunday's op-ed Outlook section, without explanation, on B2 at the top of The Zeitgiest Checklist. But the photo doesn't appear online there. The only place I can find it online via the search engine is in this AP story, part of washingtonpost.com's massive newsfeed.