Scott Thomas Beauchamp was a phony. I backed the wrong guy:
An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.
"We are not going into the details of the investigation," Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. "The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made."
Unfortunately that I put my trust in The New Republic (who still claim their facts check out) has no doubt hurt the ideas I tried to get across, that soldiers sometimes do bad things in war, and, above all, they're human. And apparently humanity can take the form of an ambitious liar. (Be warned: feeling this way makes one a "douche bag" among the unhinged.)
The best post I've read on this blogswarm was written by Rick Moran, who puts it all into perspective:
Blogs have exposed a military fabulist in Scott Beauchamp. His lies did not contribute to a lessening of war fervor among the American people. George Bush, the Pentagon, the left, and the Iraqi government have all seen to that little detail, thank you. Nor did Beauchamp's fairy tales embolden al-Qaeda, the insurgents, the Iranian backed militias, or any of the other bloody minded, murderous thugs who are making Iraq a living hell for the people there. And while Beauchamp's fibbing did not do the reputation of the military any good, Jesse Spielman and his 4 compatriots, the soldiers just convicted of raping and murdering a 14 year old Iraqi girl and her family, harmed that reputation on a scale that poor little Scotty Beauchamp and his stories of dog killing and teasing disfigured women could never approach in a million years.
This is the reality outside of Blogdom. Exposing Beauchamp was a good thing, don't get me wrong. But holding TNR and their soon to be ex-editor Franklin Foer to account for their laziness, their bias, and their incompetence is enough. That and putting a poultice on the black eye Beauchamp deliberately gave the military is all the victory that blogs can claim in this matter.
Decloaking Beauchamp will not bring us closer to "victory" in Iraq - if such a thing existed outside of the fevered imaginations of an ever dwindling number of conservatives. It will not make up for Abu Ghraib - another story whose perceived importance far, far outweighed any relationship to the reality of what actually happened. It will not induce the American people to change their minds and embrace the war effort. Nor will it shut the left up which, while something devoutly to be desired, is alas an effort doomed to failure.
Moran also feels the Beauchamp showed the blogosphere at its worst. I agree. In fact, I feel a little dirty after the whole thing, mucking around in right-wing dreck pining simultaneously for purity among the troops and a more savage response against Iraqis in order to save them, defending the free speech of a liar and the integrity of a magazine that apparently has little, and, most of all, for piling onto a blogswarm for an incident that didn't deserve the attention.
Moran:
This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe - many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.
I understand the game. I've played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There's nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion - unless what you write isn't what you truly feel in which case you won't last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn't have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.
I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.
