WHITE MAN'S BURDEN PART #3,420. I seldom follow those links at Instapundit that essentially say, "Here's a soldier that agrees with me, proof that the rest of you are sissies and traitors." Today, I broke form, goaded by IP's insistence that this message from an Army Public Affairs Officer "should be printed out and posted on the bulletin boards of newspapers everywhere."

Essentially, the anonymous soldier's pitch is that 1.) reporters are lazy and 2.) Iraqis are mentally retarded.

Now, I know from personal experience that the former is certainly true, though I would argue to the Army's PR agent that reporters dog it most when they know they're being fed bullshit and have no spade with which to dig -- which would seem to describe the lot of most "embeds" working under the Pentagon's current conditions. (The soldier also reveals that his comrades in arms don't like reporters, which will surprise no one who has survived the typical American playground).

The bit about the Iraqi people is kinda weird, though. Their long life under tyranny, the solder assures us, has caused them to "misinterpret things they see." For example, the local peasants "believed American food gave us X-Ray vision and that we had mechanical enhancements implanted in our bodies." While this seems credible (action-movie imagery interpreted by pre-industrial minds), our military Virgil takes things further with a little culturally-induced interpretation of his own: "Given that 80% of Iraqis are about as intellectually and emotionally developed as an American 6th grader," he says, "we must be very careful in trusting the average Iraqi's 'eye-witness testimony.'"

In other words, since the peasant is too simple to properly interpret Terminator movies, he is incapable of comprehending simple space-time dynamics (like who shot Achmed, and what uniform he was wearing). Of course it may be that the peasants are just plain lying -- our guide suggests that later, too, almost as an afterthought.

But the overall impression he seems to be trying to leave is that these people have no cognitive skills to speak off, and lazy reporters working for "news networks that are pushing a storyline" (unlike Army Public Affairs Officers, who are devoted to plain truth) are wrong to even consider the testimony of these subhumans.

Maybe those links weren't meant to be followed.