This Continues to be Troubling

Transfer Date Is Clear, but Not Much Else Is

For weeks, the American occupation authority in Iraq has been updating the timetable leading to the day it is supposed to go out of business, on June 30, declaring on its Web site on Sunday that there were "46 days until Iraqi sovereignty."

Yet nowhere on the Web site, or anyplace else in official American statements, can be found the identity of the new Iraqi leadership or the precise powers of the new Iraqi government over many important matters, including the full authority over Iraqi armed forces.

While I have been persuaded that the Jne 30th deadline needs to be adhered to, the lack of an Iraqi face on this process baffles me. Right now the most well-known Iraqi not associated with Saddam is al Sadr., which isn't a good thing.

I would also argue that the administration has done a terrible job at getting information out as to what is going on in terms of reconstruction and transition.

And I also blame the press for lack of reporting on the entire story. As such, Jeff Jarvis has an excellent suggestion:

If I were in charge of a bureau of reporters in Iraq -- are you listening NY Times, Washington Post, FoxNews, NBC, CBS, ABC, Reuters, BBC? -- I would assign one reporter, just one, to the rebuilding beat.

There are plenty of reporters -- hell, every reporter in the country -- assigned to the police beat, the blood-and-guts beat, the who-shot-whom today beat. When I worked in Chicago and San Francisco and New York, we had one or two reporters in the cop shop covering all that. We had hundreds of reporters covering the rest of life.

Why this hasn't been the case is beyond me. And why there hasn't been a concerted effort on the part of the administration to promote information along these lines is beyond me as well.