2007년 3월 20일: 뉴욕 타임즈와 NBC 기자들이 본 이락 전쟁 4년

   우리에게 한국 전쟁 3년이 그토록 길게 느껴졌었으니 미국인들이 이라크 전쟁 4년에 염증을 느끼는 것도 무리가 아니다.  지금 대부분의 한국인들은 이라크 주둔 미군 철수론을 남의 일처럼 여기고 있으나, 한국전쟁 때는 미군 철수론이 우리 민족이 죽고 사는 문제였다.  만약 한국 전쟁 도중에 미군이 철수하였으면 한국인의 운명은 어찌 되었겠는가?  사실,  인천상륙작전이 미국에서 철군론이 비등하던 때였다.  그때 인천상륙작전이란 묘책으로 주한미군 철군론을 막은 이가 바로 맥아더 장군이었다.

   지금 이라크 전쟁의 문제는 제2의 맥아더 장군도, 제2의 인천상륙작전같은 묘책도 없다는데 있다.  그리고 종군 기자들은 날이 갈수록 이라크 전쟁 종군 기자들은 이것이 목숨을 건 취재임을 실감한다고 한다.  위 동영상 사진 왼편의 NBC 기자는 어서 이라크를 빨리 빠져나가지 않으면 자기도 죽겠구나 하는 느낌을 가지고 근무해야 하는 고충을 토로한다.  

   현재 이라크에서 거의 매일 자행되고 있는 테러는 일종의 게릴라전이다.  미군은 시민과 적을 구별할 수 없는 곳에서 근무해야 하며, 바로 그것이 월남전의 상황이었으며, 1975년 3월 월맹이 월남 중부지방에 해방구를 설치하고 시민군을 창군하자 미군은 참전을 포기했으며, 1980년 5월 김일성이 바로 월남 중부 지방 시민군을 모방하여 광주에 해방구를 설치토록 하고 창군 공작을 한 것이 5.18 시민군이었다.  

   미국이 지금 이 피곤한 이라크 전쟁에 얼마나 부담을 느끼느냐는 현재 진행되고 있는 북미간이 더러운 거래에서 보여진다.  한국인으로서는 지금 한국의 주권과 안보가 어떤 싼 값으로 거래되고 있는지 모른다.  미국이 갑자기 변심하였다기보다 이라크 전쟁에 지쳐 한국 안보를 북한에 양보하고 있는 것이다.  

   이락 전쟁 4년은 미국이 이라크 민주주의 지원을 언제까지 지속할 수 있느냐의 시험대에 미국이 지금 서있음을 의미한다.  그러면, 노무현 독재정권 치하에서 지금 한국은 어디에 서있는가?  1905년의 상황과 비슷하다.  그 당시에도 미일간 비밀거래(가스라테프트 밀약)가 있었는데, 테프트 육군대장에게 당시 미국 대통령이 보낸 메모에는 "미국은 필립핀과 조선 두 나라를 동시에 지켜줄 수 없다.  조선처럼 스스로 안보 노력을 하지 않는 나라를 미국이 대신 지켜주어야 할 의무는 없는 것이다"고 적혀있다.  

   지금도 상황은 비슷하다.  북한의 적화통일 계획이 진행되고 있다.  만약 한국인에게 자유민주주의를 수호하려는 의지가 없다면 미국은 북한의 더러운 거래제의에 응할 수 있는 것이다.  평화협정을 체결한 다음에 주한미군 철수의 수순을 밟는다.  북미간의 더러운 거래가 거기까지 진행되는 상황이 올 때는 한국은 풍전 등화의 위기에 처할 것이다.  미국과 월맹간의 평화협정은 주월미군 철수로 이어졌으며, 지금 야수 김정일이 먹이에 군침을 삼키며 노리고 있는 것이 바로 그것이다.

>> Lehrer: Still coming tonight, health care in post-katrina new orleans; religion in society; and reporting the iraq war. Jeffrey brown of our media unit has that story behind the stories. Four years into the war iraq remains the deadliest country in the world for reporters, that according to the committee to protect journalists. Richard eveninging went to iraq as a free lance journalist four years ago before joining nbc. He kept a video journal of his time there and his documentary uncovering the war called war zone diary airs tomorrow. Here's a short excerpt, a note we edited out one particularly disturbing image.

>> Back up.

>> Reporter: We were caught out. We had been operating one way for several months. We thought that the pattern had emerged. We were able to go anywhere we wanted to in the country. Suddenly the rules of the game had changed. We were targets.

>> Everybody all right?

>> Reporter: Our hotel, our first bureau was bombed.

>> Move to the other side of the hotel.

>> Should have said yes.

>> Fortunately it wasn't big enough to knock the building down.

>>.

>> Reporter: Poor guy. He was one of the hotel's cleaning staff. He was sleeping in the lobby.

>> I have a theory as to why insurgents are now attacking journalists. They're now making their own videos, posting them on the internet. I have hundreds of them where they show their own attacks and kidnappings and mortars.

>> The insurgents groups have evidently decided it's not worth it to talk to the western press.

>> Infidels we are here just to call them terrorists. Better, they think, to put their own message out. Post it so everyone in the world can see it and then try and drive reporters out of the country.

>> Brown: Richard engel joins us now from burbank also with us from cambridge england is john burns. The baghdad bureau chief for the "new york times" who has appeared often on this program to update us on events in iraq. Well, richard engel, we saw in that clip how things suddenly changed for you. Tell us more about how the dangers affect your reporting now.

>> Reporter: The conflict we're covering right now is not the same war that we were covering four years ago. The initial phase of the bombing campaign had its limitations. There was the saddam government still in power. And then for almost a year we had complete access in the country and were able to go anywhere. It was a time of great exploration. I would drive my own car all over the country. And then foreign fighters started to come in. The sunni insurgency started to develop. And now it's come to the stage that we have to operate like thieves, going out into the city, stealing bits of information, conducting interviews in secret, and then bringing them out and putting our reports together. It is a completely different way of covering this conflict.

>> Brown: John burns, you've covered other wars and conflicts. How is this compared in terms of your ability to move around, your ability to talk to people, your ability to report the story?

>> Well, I've said it before. I think that in terms of sustained coverage, this is the most hazardous situation that western reporters, people like myself and richard, have been exposed to. In a generation. I say "sustained" because chechnya, somalia, darfur-- to cite only three examples-- exposed reporters to very great hazards over the much briefer periods of time that they tend to spend in these areas. In baghdad, of course, we're based there. We spend months at a time there. There's no doubt that the hazards are very great indeed and that that impacted quite seriously on our reporting.

>> Brown: John, staying with you, the question then is how much are your readers or viewers, richard's viewers and our viewers, how much are they seeing of the full story or is it just by definition in war that you don't get the full story?

>> Well, i see this is a glass half full for me. There's no doubt that, as i say, our reporting has been very much restricted, con trained by the hazards that we face. But I've been in the united states recently and discovered that you can live relatively anonymously on the front page of the "new york times" for 30 years but if you be on television people recognize you so people have been stopping me in the streets, at airports and on trains and talk to go me about iraq, in the united states. What I found was that the american public is extraordinarily well informed. While there are things we'd like to do that we cannot do, I don't think that there are any fundamentally important truths about this war that we have not been able to tell. I don't mean just the "new york times". I mean the other principal american newspapers. And the principal television networks. So i think on that score, the american public has been, my sense is at least talking to americans as i say over the last month or so, well served and that the american voterl ? the american television viewer, the american newspaper reader knows full well what the state of affairs in iraq is.

>> Brown: Richard, in that number that I cited by the committee to protect journalists, by far the greatest danger is for iraqi journalists, the local people on the ground. You work with them. You talk about two that you work with in particular in your documentary. Tell us about how that works for you, your reliance on them.

>> Our dependency, you can see more than reliance, has grown over the years. That we have to use these local reporter-- and i don't mean it in an exploitative way-- but we have to rely on them and depend on them to be our eyes and ears in areas where we can no longer go. It is even becoming dangerous right now for iraqi reporters to go out into baghdad. We have to have iraqis from a particular neighborhood gathering information and taking pictures. Shiites from eastern baghdad simply cannot go to certain parts of sunni western baghdad, take pictures and bring them back to our bureau without risking their lives. So it is a often system where we have remote control and over the last several years we've developed networks of stringers, of informants, of snitches, whatever you want to call them, people who phone us in or bring in pieces of video that they've gathered all over the country. One of the main challenges we face is trying to verify this information and try and double and triple check that it's accurate. That has been one of the main challenges that we've been struggling with.

>> Brown: Richard, another thing i noticed in watching your documentary this weekend when i got a screening copy was that you have a lot of gruesome footage there. You have a lot of mutilated bodies, body parts. How much of that appeared... how much, if any, of it appeared on the network news? How much of that real face of war do viewers see?

>> I personally don't think they see enough of it. That's not because i want to put anything gratuitously violent on the air. But this documentary is very different from the normal very fast tightly edited pieces that are put on nbc news. It is much slower. It's very raw. There is no story line, no characters. And no ending really. It just shows what the war has looked for me from the ground up. Often for iraqi families and for me that means seeing bodies, having friends who were kidnapped or killed and i think it reflects what have been the horrors of war. Also it shows sometimes some times that have been truly heroic, wounded carrying wounded soldiers out of battle. I think these extreme situations war time brings out the very best and the very worst in human nature and often times in war, in this particular one, it's the worst.

>> Brown: John burns, what do you think about to what extent people are seeing that face of the war?

>> Reporter: There's no doubt that the editors at the "new york times" and other principal newspapers and at the major american television networks exercise their judgment in sparing the reader or the viewer some of the worst violence. I think it's probably as well that they do. They do the same thing, after all, when violence occurred elsewhere in the world and indeed when it occurs on american streets. That doesn't trouble me a great deal. I think that the extent of violence in iraq is well understood by even the casual reader of an american newspaper. Or the casual viewer of an american nightly newscast. That doesn't concern me. I do want to say, if i may, listening to what richard said about the difficulty of going out, it is of course much more difficult for television crews to get out and about in baghdad because of the bulk, if you will, of a television crew where you've got to have a camera which makes you very visible and very vulnerable. It is more difficult for them than it is for us where we can send a lone reporter out who can, to some extent, operate sort of incognito, not completely. We have to be very careful about it. But if we want to go somewhere, we generally speaking can get there. We can generally speaking can get there ourselves. There are some cases where if we can't and where we do ask iraqis to go for us always on a willing partner basis but to make again the point i made earlier. If there's something important about the iraq war, we get there. We tell the story. I don't speak now only about the "new york times". I think it's equally true of the other principal newspapers.

>> Brown: Richard, you mentioned that your documentary is a personal take on the experience. And you say in the film that everyone there goes through four stages of sensibility, i guess, in experiencing or covering the war. Tell us a little bit about that and where you're at now.

>> It's something of a theory. I'm not sure if every reporter goes through this. But I've noticed this in my own experience that stage one, when I first arrived I was perhaps more naive and ambitious about the covering of the war. I thought I'm invincible. I'm superman. Nothing is going to happen to me. Then as the conflict goes on, I thought, well, this really is dangerous, something might happen to me. Then you move into stage 3. I've been here aim something is probably going to happen to me. And then stage 4, this is it. I've used up all of my luck. I'm going to die here unless i leave. I think over the past years I've definitely put myself in stage 3 occasionally on bad days I'll even dip into stage 4. That is something that concerns me.

>> Brown: John burns, does it take a personal toll on you? Do you feel that in a personal way, having been there all these years?

>> Look, i would be foolish and vein glorious of me toy,you know, we don't feel it. Of course we feel it. We should feel it. I tell newly arrived "new york times" correspondents that they should have no illusions about where they are and no illusions about the potential price that they may pay for being there. It needs to be said that covering a war and covering a war of the significance that this war has assumed for the united states is an exhilarating affair. It's a tragic affair. But if you're a reporter, if you're a foreign reporter, you want to be where the big story is and the compensation for the risks taken is, of course, being there on a very big story. You know, I'm in my 60s. I'm 62 years old. I feel myself and i don't want to be falsely humble here. But i feel myself quite lucky and quite privileged in a way to be still there on the front line of this war because that's where I want to be as a reporter. We know what the risks are. If things turn out against us, as I've often thought in the words of captain scott the british explorer who went to the south pole in 1912 and died with all his men on the way back, he wrote in his diary on his last night before he died, which is now in a museum about a mile from where I'm sitting in cambridge. He said we took risks. We knew we took them. Now that things have turned out against them, we have no course for complaint. I don't overdramatize this but we go there willingly. We know what the risks are. We take them willingly. If we didn't, we would leave and we could leave at any time.

>> Brown: All right. I understand both of you are headed back pretty soon. Thanks for joining us. John burns of the "new york times". Richard engel of nbc.

>> Thank you.

>> Lehrer: Now, the continuing struggle to provide health care in new orleans after hurricane katrina. <