You can't handle the truth! Iraq's press starts to flex

A dozen cameramen aimed their lenses from tripods at the back of the room. Microphones and tape recorders were pointed toward the table, where three Iraqi generals sat, and at the lectern, behind which stood an Italian NATO general with one of the world's great mustaches. Klieg lights glared over this small stage, and four dozen reporters sat in chairs, clutching blue folders filled with bilingual background papers and bios.

The Green Zone press room, formally known as the Combined Press Information Center.

A standard press conference, familiar to any American who's ever watched the evening or breaking news.

Except for one important detail: I was the only Western correspondent in the room.

Everybody else was Iraqi.

In one of the thousand tiny tipoffs that, despite more than five years of war, Iraq is inching toward democracy, today's conference revealed an emerging free press. From a handful of legal news outlets during the Saddam era, Iraq's press has followed Mao's dictum that a thousand flowers bloom. Hundreds of newspapers, many of them with only a handful of readers, are now available to Iraq's highly literate citizenry.

The stated purpose of the press conference was a fairly predictable dog-and-pony show organized by the Americans. The Italian general talked about the four-year-long NATO training mission to help Iraqi security forces become more professional and less sectarian, more fair and less brutal. After Maj. Gen. Alessandro Pompegnani and his three Iraqi counterparts produced some vanilla bromides about how well they'd cooperated, etc., etc., etc., the floor was opened to questions.

Wow! I thought I was back in the LAPD press room watching senior cops squirm over the latest allegations of police violence or corruption. Has NATO provided enough equipment to Iraqis for stop terrorists? America has also been using private contractors to help train Iraqis--does this mean NATO's training was inadequate? Has the training helped eliminate sectarian influence on law enforcement and military operations? When can Iraqis get along without NATO or MNF (Multinational Forces) training and train their troops on their own? When will this training begin to include women so that they can accompany security forces when, for example, they enter a private home where there are women and children? (This last one was by Sahar, one of the award-winning female journalists from our Baghdad bureau.)

Most of the answers were also fairly predictable: diplomatic sidesteps, personal impressions not official responses, that's-a-political-question-and-I'm-a-simple-military-man.

Regardless, I was impressed that so many Iraqi journalists felt confident enough to throw hardballs at men who only a few years back--or even months--may have tried to throw 'em in the slam without charges and without a key.

If they keep this up and stay unafraid of speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, shining a light into the dark corners and all that stuff we American journalists say we do, then it's gonna be hard for Iraq to devolve back into the bad old days of authoritarian rule.

Sure, that could happen. We've seen too many false dawns in Iraq and elsewhere in the world when it seemed free societies were just over the horizon.

And it will happen--if the U.S. continues to call the shots in Iraq. When--and only then--Iraqis truly start running their own affairs will these baby-steps toward democracy become full strides.

One of the first signs will be when a press conference like today's is held in a strictly Iraqi setting, outside the cossetting American public affairs specialists who handed out the headsets and taped the proceedings.

One of the good signs is that after the press conference, the Iraqi journalists surged into a nearby air-conditioned room. There, like newsies the Free World over, they started stuffing themselves with free food.