Nothing new on the Scott Thomas Beauchamp matter to report – or at least worth reporting. The fact is, I find the digression into who his wife is, what he blogged about 2 years ago, who he went to school with, or any other minutia the rightosphere has been unearthing these last 24 hours to be irrelevant to the main point.

Indeed, this point seems to have escaped the left’s attention as well. Digby’s post yesterday sums up the view from the left:

But this is bigger than blogospherics. There has been precious little good writing about the actual gritty experiences of average soldiers in these wars. Everything has been so packaged and marketed from the top that it’s very difficult to get a sense of what it’s like over there. I have no idea if this piece is accurate, but regardless it didn’t seem to me to be an indictment of the military in general, merely a description of the kind of gallows humor and garden variety cruelty that would be likely to escalate in violent circumstances. And so far, there has been nothing substantial brought forward to doubt his story—the shrieking nitpicking of the 101st keyboarders notwithstanding.

It certainly should not have have garnered this vicious right wing attack from everyone from Bill Kristol to the lowliest denizens of the right blogosphere. They want to destroy this soldier for describing things that have been described in war reporting since Homer so they can worship “the troops” without having to admit that the whole endeavor is a bloody, horrible mess that only briefly, and rarely, offers opportunity for heroic battlefield courage (which, of course, it sometimes does as well.)

(Read the whole thing for a fascinating glimpse into something I’ve been noticing more and more on the left: This need to practice armchair psychology on the right, laughably – indeed uproariously trying to “explain” why many on the right support the troops or the war. What makes it so amusing is not only their painfully obvious ignorance of psychology but their overarching hubris in believing that their diagnoses are viable.)

I find these thoughts of Digby’s fascinating on several levels. He really doesn’t have a clue the extent to which current and former vets have destroyed Beuachamp’s claims. No doubt he hasn’t bothered to read the debunkings of people who know a helluva lot more about the efficacy of Beauchamp’s stories than he or I. The critiques of the Milbloggers as well as soldiers emailing from Iraq are persuasive and compelling. It is a shame Digby didn’t feel it necessary to grant them the courtesy of reading their admittedly circumstantial but strong case for Beauchamp being a fabulist.

It is equally baffling that Digby downplays the dispatches of several embedded bloggers whose powerful reporting on the “gritty experiences of average soldiers in these wars” is rightfully seen as the best journalism out of Iraq and Afghanistan to date? Michael Yon, Michael Totten (whose detailed Lebanon dispatches have also been far beyond anything you can read in the US except perhaps the English language Arab press), and J.D. Johannes have each, to varying degrees expressed disgust with the way the war was being fought over the last three years as well as revealing bad soldiering and bad leadership. One could hardly call their writings “packaged and marketed from the top.”

What this shows about Digby is an insularity about the war I find common on both the right and left. No one wants to read anything that will shake the foundations of their beliefs about Iraq. Good news is no news for the left as is bad news about the war on the right. Perhaps this is inevitable with the current state of our shattered polity. Challenging long held assumptions gets people out of their comfort zone very quickly and stories like those told by Beauchamp are unsettling as is their attempted debunking for that reason.

Smearing the troops (and yes, that is what Beauchamp was doing and doing it knowingly) goes hand in hand with delegitimizing their efforts. John Cole makes the point that thanks to the attention paid this story by the rightosphere, the smear has spread far and wide whereas before, it was confined to TNR’s dwindling number of readers. There’s something to that notion although if, as seems very probable, much of what Beauchamp was “reporting” from Iraq were either fantasies or rumors presented as fact, certainly it needed to be exposed. But as for all the side issues about Scott Beauchamps wife working for TNR and what he may have written before being deployed seems to me a lot of fluff and non-germane to the real question no one on the left is asking.

Why didn’t TNR vet the stories before going to press?

It could be that they are simply bad journalists in which case anyone involved in getting this story out to the public should be fired. But the most common reason given for running the articles on the right is that Franklin Foer and his staff have an inherent bias against the Iraq War and wished to undermine support for it by publishing false information deliberately.

First, it should be said, support for the war can hardly be “undermined” when 70% of the country has already given up and wants the troops home. The deadly combination of George Bush’s incompetent prosecution of the war and incoherent defense of the reasons for being there along with the deliberate effort by the left to sabotage the war effort by questioning our motives and challenging the integrity and even legitimacy of those in charge has predictably caused the average voter to demand an end to the conflict.

But relating to Beauchamp, the right’s critique of his probable fables is a hollow victory. It will change no one’s mind about the war. It will not prove anything about the military that we don’t already know; that the overwhelming majority of those serving in Iraq are dedicated people who perform their duties honorably but that there are a few whose actions do not reflect well on the history and tradition of the United States Army. This is why Beauchamp’s stories seem plausible to people like Franklin Foer and Digby. Why bother to check the facts if we know this kind of thing happens all the time in Iraq? I see nothing in Digby’s piece that takes TNR to task for just now getting around to checking the accuracy of the incidents portrayed in Beauchamp’s stories which leads me to believe he didn’t think it important either.

But that is the point about the Beauchamp caper; incuriousness on the part of the press in general regarding stories about anything in Iraq – the troops, al-Qaeda, signs of progress or lack thereof, and especially about where much of the news appears to be coming from.

In the defense of journalists, more than 120 members of the press have been killed in Iraq making it the most dangerous war zone for journalists since World War II. It is an almost impossible task to cover the “big picture” for which major publications and the news nets are so fond of reporting. In fact, in a conflict like Iraq, there might not be much of a big picture or perhaps a big picture that has so many pieces to it that it becomes too expensive or too complex to cover. For the press, when in doubt, follow the blood. So because of the difficulty in telling the whole story, the press substitutes body count journalism – so many Iraqis blown up here. So many dead terrorists there. And of course, the solemn, ever rising toll on American families as their loved ones are killed or maimed.

Is this really the best the press can do? Obviously not. And Scott Beauchamp is living proof of both the pitfalls of a different kind of war reporting attempted far too rarely by the media as well as the opportunities it provides.

Is there a “larger truth” about the war to be found in the writings of people like Yon, Totten, and even Beauchamp? It may not be sexy or even very interesting in a modern media sort of way – not with the news taking on all the characteristics of show business – but I believe there is an “overall” being missed by those who cover Iraq for traditional media. It is the simple everyday travails of both the Iraqi people and our men in Iraq that will determine the success or failure of our Iraq adventure.

There is now nor will there ever be some grand denouement to the war. No general will be able to place his boot on the bloody neck of a vanquished al-Qaeda leader and claim victory. Nor I suspect will there be some cataclysmic explosion of violence that will turn Iraq into the haven for al-Qaeda and puppet of Iran. Whatever happens will occur at street level. And it is here that the worm’s eye view of the war by the internet correspondents and the wannabes like Beauchamp have it all over the traditional media.