I’m watching CNN…they have a spli screen running…one half is the 7th Cavalry speeding toward Baghdad across the Southern Iraq desert with a bunch of choppers and tanks, and the other side is a shot of 10 or 12 Iraqi soldiers patrolling the Kurdish territory border…
this is soooo weird!
I can’t believe I’m watching this live!
Yeah, that was pretty darned cool.
The ultimate in reality TV. 
When does “Real World: Iraq” Start?
The whole “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy keeps that from ever happening.
Although, I think they should scramble some teams, and film an episode of ‘Survivor’ out in the desert.
Dress 'em up in fatigues, and whoever walks all the way across the country without becoming toast wins a million bucks.
“I’m a celebrity, get me to Baghdad”
Politicking aside, I’ve got to admit that the live broadcasts that we’re seeing are astonishing. I remained glued to the box last night until I literally passed out.
The footage of the 7[sup]th[/sup] Cavalry – even the heavily-compressed videophone footage – is incredible – and apparently CNN has a HumVee with an honest-to-gosh satellite-uplink onboard, so there’s the possibility that we’ll be seeing conventional broadcast-quality video from the battlefield before this is over, which I’m finding it really hard to wrap my head around.
The pixellated view of the videophone reinforces a sort of cognitive-dissonance for me, because most of my familiarity with the involved hardware comes from combat-simulation games, and it’s hard to shake the pavlovian expectation of “fun” in light of the seriousness of the situation. Hard to express, sorry.
I agree. It really is amazing. I turn on the coverage just to see if there are any new developments, and find myself watching for a couple of hours.
I just hope we don’t see anyone get killed live on camera.
Any Aussies or Kiwis remember Neil Davis?