Withdrawal from Iraq?

A new year dawns with yet another sign of how much the news business has changed during the half-century that your reporter has been a part of it: As The New York Times reported this past week, the "Big Three" television news networks have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq. That's the same Iraq where more than 130,000 U.S. troops still stand in harm's way.

Your reporter remembers a time, not so very long ago, when the major television news divisions maintained full-time, fully staffed bureaus in cities such as Paris, Jakarta, Cairo and Beirut, along with numerous other datelines around the world. Important events haven't stopped happening in these places, but, starting in the 1980s, television and print news organizations began to shutter these foreign bureaus in order to cut costs.

A small handful of remaining outposts such as London, Tel Aviv and Beijing have been left to pick up the slack. Correspondents based in these cities are often responsible for covering news thousands of miles away, sometimes on other continents. So when big news breaks — an earthquake, a tsunami, a war — the reporters and their crews can "parachute in" to cover the story. But the absence of a long-term, consistent journalistic presence in entire regions of the globe means that coverage of breaking news too often lacks the context and depth needed to truly understand events as they develop. As a result, American news consumers may get the "who," the "what" and the "where" of a story but can be left wholly in the dark about the "how" and the "why."

In news stories that hinge on political developments abroad, this means U.S. citizens can be left woefully unaware of a situation until it becomes a full-blown crisis; in stories that center on natural disasters, it means that we don't have a meaningful framework for understanding how an event (and a government's response) will impact a nation and a region in the near and long term.

For a representative democracy that, however challenged at the moment, remains the world's sole economic

and military superpower, this is a serious problem. If We the People want an American foreign policy that is both responsive to public opinion and effective, We the People need to be kept abreast of what's going on in the world on a regular basis instead of just cramming on the history and culture of foreign locales (as journalists and news consumers alike are now forced to do) when something big happens.

When, for example, a devastating earthquake hits Pakistan, Americans should be aware right away — not weeks later — what the implications could be for a government that possesses nuclear weapons and a tenuous hold on power. When places like Iraq or Iran become the subject of international tensions, We the People need to know the history of U.S. relations with these countries, or risk relying solely on official pronouncements made with specific policy aims in mind.

Coming up on six years since the U.S. invasion, Iraq is still a deadly place for Americans in uniform. Yes, the situation and the story there have changed over time, with political maneuvers beginning to overtake military maneuvers in prominence. These kinds of stories can be more challenging to report, particularly for television news, with its reliance on pictures. But that doesn't mean that they do not merit reporting in a daily, sustained way. Not when so many lives have been lost in the Iraqi experiment, not when so many billions have been spent in a strategically vital and volatile region. And not, perhaps most of all, when We the People still have tens of thousands of our countrymen and women serving there.