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What Can Be Hidden
07/28/2003

Well, they aren't the weapons we want to be digging up:

U.S. soldiers discovered 40 anti-tank mines, dozens of mortar rounds and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder on Monday buried in Saddam Hussein's hometown - enough for a month of attacks on U.S. troops. ...

U.S. soldiers dug up the freshly buried weapons outside an abandoned building that once belonged to Saddam's Fedayeen militia in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown and power base in which he still enjoys widespread support.

But it's great that we found them. What strikes me with this news is that this is how our enemies handle weapons to which they want immediate access while on the run. Considering the even more secretive nature of the weapons that we really want to find as well as the likelihood that they were hidden by a regime still in power, this find gives some indication of what we face in that search.

So that's what strikes me about this news. What strikes me about the way in which it is presented is the large five-paragraph serving of bad news that the Associated Press inserted where I've put the ellipsis in my quotation. Can't have readers getting too optimistic, now can we?

On the other hand, radical Iraqi militants are helping to lighten the reportage by choosing names that obviously skipped a round or two of focus groups and test marketing: "Jihad Salafi Group." Salafi? That sounds like an excursion to view Italian meats in the wild.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:06 PM EST