Reporting Iraq like reporting on the Chinese government

Is reporting in Iraq really like reporting on the Chinese government? Well, according to some longtime journalists it is. Talking in the The Norman Transcript Oliver Schell, director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, describes it as it is,

He described a trip to Baghdad to visit the Times’ bureau, complete with its 50-person army of security guards. “You sit in this compound. You can’t go out… It’s very, very dangerous there. When you can go out you can only go to the Green Zone. It was like living in a kind of ‘Bladerunner’ like situation. You didn’t dare spend very long out there,” he said. He said the Iraq war’s stated goal to take out a dictator and replace him with a democratically elected government was a noble one but that it had now become a unprecedenteed disaster with few worthwhile exit strategies. “It’s not a very pretty picture,” he said. Schell said there were “haunting echoes” of the war in Vietnam and press-government relations there. link