Pro-war Iraq journalist Steven Vincent, RIP

American freelance journalist Steven Vincent has become the first American journalist to be attacked and killed in the Iraq War.

Unlike many (most?) journos covering the war in Iraq, Vincent supported the invasion, calling it part of a much larger campaign against "Islamo-fascism."

Also, unlike many big-time journalists who report from the relative security of Baghdad's "Green Zone" (without mentioning those security precautions in their filings, leaving a false impression of gritty, down-in-the-trenches reporting), Vincent walked the streets of Basra for months, with a translator and without a bodyguard, gathering material for a book, a follow-up to In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq. His reporting from Iraq appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and National Review Online.

NRO's Katherine Lopez had this to say in her tribute: " We would not know about the good that men and women do -- courageous Iraqis, Americans, and other members of the Coalition in this case -- without good men like Steven Vincent willing to find out about it in the first place, on frontlines crawling with evildoers."

Last year Times Watch linked to a Vincent story from Iraq in which he employed his art-critic expertise to show how many Iraqi artists actually favored Saddam Hussein because the dictator kept the commissions rolling: "Because of the despot’s beneficence to artists--advocates of government arts funding, take note--support for the tyrant runs deep there."