NYT's Baghdad Bureau Chief: 'No Doubt' Surge Making Life Better in Iraq

Published: August 8, 2007, 10:52 am

Tags: iraq, john burns, day to day, national public radio, new york times

The August 7 edition of National Public Radio's afternoon news show "Day to Day" featured John Burns, the respected Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times. Burns, who had his life threatened by the Hussein regime while covering Iraq, is leaving the country to head the London bureau of the Times. Host Lex Chadwick introduced Burns as "Perhaps the most respected war reporter of our time." Burns thinks that in retrospect invading Iraq may have been a "mission impossible," given what Saddam Hussein had done to the psychology of his subjects. But Burns also thinks "there's no doubt" things are better in Iraq since the troop surge and that a withdrawal would make life "very much worse" there. Burns: " I think if we had our time over again, considering what has happened, we -- or to speak for myself -- I would have spent more of my energies trying to write about what lay beneath, if you will, a carapace of terror here, the deeply

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