Baghdad is less safe if you don’t have 100 soldiers with you and attack choppers for air cover.
It shouldn’t be a rare event when a mainstream media outlet delves into the facts behind a photo-op event, but it is. (This sort of crap from CNN is much more typical.) Kudos to the Kirk Semple and his editors.
Bonus Now we get to see some wingnut heads explode as their desire to believe bad things about John McCain collides with their reluctance to believe anything published in the New York Times or anything that shows how badly things are going in Iraq. And of course McCain wasn’t alone in his gross misrepresentation of the situation; Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, and Rick Renzi were all co-bamboozlers.