イラク戦争

バッタママさん、ひょっとすると、わたしたちの米軍陰謀説、負けたかも（笑）

ガーディアンが、詳しい記事を書いてました。東京発。外国人ジャーナリストによる文章です。

　 まず、紹介。あとで、どうして負けたと思うか、説明するね（一番最後の段落をみればすぐわかるんだけど）
Tokyo dispatch

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Reporting the realities of war
　
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1229778,00.html

The bravery of two freelance Japanese journalists killed as they worked in Iraq is in stark contrast to Japan's line-toeing media executives, says Justin McCurry

Wednesday June 2, 2004
The past few weeks have seen Japanese journalism at both its boldest and its most craven.
Its less endearing side was displayed when five children, whose parents were abducted by communist agents during the cold war, arrived from North Korea.

The journalists wanted to know whether the children's parents, who returned to Japan in 2002, had taught them any Japanese. Were the reunited families sitting down to eat Japanese or Korean meals? What had they bought on their first shopping trip together?

Those reunions were not the only progress made at last month's Pyongyang meeting between the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.

However, the media made little of pledges by Kim to refrain from conducting nuclear weapons tests, his willingness to talk again, or his desire for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. These were all causes for optimism, but were buried beneath minutiae about the children.

In the midst of it all lie the near-extinguished embers of a pension premiums scandal, involving dozens of senior politicians, that broke just before Mr Koizumi's trip to Pyongyang. No one, it seems, is willing to breathe life into them.

In Iraq, renewed violence in the town of Samawa, where hundreds of Japanese troops are stationed, has been dealt with in brief dispatches from agency reporters who, along with their military minders, are confined to base while mortars fall outside.

Instead, we have to turn to the Dutch media for the most comprehensive accounts of fighting around the town.

How comfortable life must be for governments when media executives - often to the frustration of their reporters on the ground - churn out identikit coverage, all of it towing the official line.

Hence North Korea is congenitally evil, Samawa is safe, and the skipping of pension contributions by ministers - tantamount to tax evasion - is not a matter for resignation.

Reporters who go off-message are branded loose cannon, pseudo journalists who have a political axe to grind, or just plain irresponsible.

By that definition, Shinsuke Hashida was a deeply irresponsible man. A veteran of wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Gulf, the 61-year-old, with his shock of white hair and spectacular grin, was drawn to trouble.

During the US invasion of Iraq, he avoided "safe" areas, aware that, as a freelance journalist, footage of uneventful Baghdad streets was hardly going to earn him healthy commissions.

His professional addiction to danger was shared by his nephew, 33-year-old Kotaro Ogawa. Fittingly, they were together when the car they were travelling in was ambushed by gunmen just outside Baghdad last week.

The bullet-riddled vehicle burst into flames and smashed into a tree, killing Hashida and his Iraqi interpreter where they sat. Ogawa survived the first attack, but not the bullet to the head administered by one of the gunmen minutes later.

Before leaving for Iraq, Hashida had joked to his wife, Yukiko, that she would be duty-bound to fly to the Middle East to collect his body if he was killed.