ROME -- Italy will start the process of withdrawing troops from Iraq in September, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday, marking the beginning of a pullback of a key member of the U.S.-led coalition forces there.
"Beginning in September we will begin a progressive reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq," Mr. Berlusconi said on a television talk show that was to be broadcast late Tuesday evening. The comments were confirmed on the government's official Web site.
Italy has maintained a force of around 3,000 soldiers in Iraq since 2003, one of the largest forces in the coalition. Despite persistent protests from the center-left opposition and public opinion polls which showed a majority of Italians opposed involvement, Mr. Berlusconi has remained a steadfast ally of the U.S., affirming his support for the mission even in the face of setbacks for Italian forces.
The most dramatic of those setbacks arose on March 4, when U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint outside the Baghdad airport opened fire on a vehicle containing an Italian intelligence officer and a recently released Italian hostage. The intelligence officer, who had secured the release of the hostage only hours before, was killed, further inflaming public opinion in Italy and drawing the ire even of some of Mr. Berlusconi's close political allies, who raised questions about whether Italy had become too subservient toward the U.S.
The only thing missing is the crucial context of the story.
In the article above, the carefully chosen generic word "hostage" is deflecting the much wider context of the story — namely, that this supposedly generic "hostage" was Giuliana Sgrena, the journalist who had reported on possible use of napalm by American forces:
«We buried them, but we could not identify them because they were charred from the napalm bombs used by the Americans». People from Saqlawiya village, near Falluja, told al Jazeera television, based in Qatar, that they helped bury 73 bodies of women and children completely charred, all in the same grave. The sad story of common graves, which started at Saddam’s times, is not yet finished. Nobody could confirm if napalm bombs have been used in Falluja, but other bodies found last year after the fierce battle at Baghdad airport were also completely charred and some thought of nuclear bombs. No independent source could verify the facts, since all the news arrived until now are those spread by journalists embedded with the American troops, who would only allow British and American media to enrol with them. But the villagers who fled in the last few days spoke of many bodies which had not been buried: it was too dangerous to collect the corpses during the battle.
When the hostage isn't a mere bystander but an active reporter of possible war crimes by the people who killed her countryman while he was trying to protect her, the word "hostage" just won't do.
For a newspaper as self-appointedly serious as the Wall Street Journal, omitting such salient details from a life-and-death story of international importance crosses the boundary from simple incompetence into calculated complicity.
