Over the weekend a London TimesOnline editrorial reported, "Serious success in Iraq is not being recognized as it should be." Accustomed as I am to the reporting of our U.S. mainstream press, I find it mildly surprising when anyone anywhere admits there is success in Iraq -- of any kind, never mind serious success. But then to go further and recognize that it has gone unreported! Well, I'm not sure my system can stand the shock.
Is no news good news or bad news? In Iraq, it seems good news is deemed no news. There has been striking success in the past few months in the attempt to improve security, defeat al-Qaeda sympathisers and create the political conditions in which a settlement between the Shia and the Sunni communities can be reached. This has not been an accident but the consequence of a strategy overseen by General David Petraeus in the past several months. While summarised by the single word “surge” his efforts have not just been about putting more troops on the ground but also employing them in a more sophisticated manner. This drive has effectively broken whatever alliances might have been struck in the past by terrorist factions and aggrieved Sunnis. Cities such as Fallujah, once notorious centres of slaughter, have been transformed in a remarkable time.
Indeed, on every relevant measure, the shape of the Petraeus curve is profoundly encouraging. It is not only the number of coalition deaths and injuries that has fallen sharply (October was the best month for 18 months and the second-best in almost four years), but the number of fatalities among Iraqi civilians has also tumbled similarly. This process started outside Baghdad but now even the capital itself has a sense of being much less violent and more viable. As we report today, something akin to a normal nightlife is beginning to re-emerge in the city. As the pace of reconstruction quickens, the prospects for economic recovery will be enhanced yet further. With oil at record high prices, Iraq should be an extremely prosperous nation and in a position to start planning for its future with confidence.
As they say at the TimesOnline, the improvement is not an accident, and as they also recognize, ignoring the improvement is not an accident either, calling it instead, "a catastrophic miscalculation." To understand the extent of the miscalculation, one ought to understand how an insurgency hopes to succeed.
Outgunned and outmanned, al Qaeda and the insurgents could never hope to prevail over American military superiority. Instead their strategy has been to convince a war weary American public that the war in Iraq was impossible to win. The plan was to present the American public with ever mounting death toll in an endless war. Public discontent was supposed to force congress and the president bring the boys home, leaving al Qaeda and the insurgents to fight over the remains of Iraq. It was a plan that depended upon the sensationalist news media to present the "reality of war" on behalf of al Qaeda and the insurgency.
They beauty of that strategy was that al Qaeda didn't even have to kill American soldiers for it to work. Anybody, would do. Bomb a market place, kidnap random people and leave their bodies in the street. Just kill. That's the leverage. Kill some defenseless Iraqis and let the the press go to work. They'll take care of public opinion.
As was anticipated in many quarters, al Qaeda put maximum effort into that strategy in the run-up to the 2006 U.S. congressional elections. As it happens, congressional Democrats had already decided that pulling out of Iraq was their winning political strategy, and so they relentlessly attacked the administration for failing to recognize the futility of the war. Their political attacks lined up so neatly with the insurgent/al Qaeda bomb attacks, and for the Democrats it paid off in the short run. They took both houses.
It's in the long run that it can turn out to have been their catastrophic miscalculation. A majority of Americans still seem willing to concede a position of moral authority to congressional Democrats based on their stated anti-war position. For others of us, the morality facade has worn way too thin to conceal their blatant political opportunism. Democrats are not really anti-war, only anti-administration. They have become committed to pinning responsibility of an American failure in Iraq on the administration. Unfortunately, their actions can be seen as helping that failure to become reality by joining with the press public relations blitz to build public opposition. In other words, both the press and the Democrats had become part of the al Qaeda/insurgent propaganda machine. That the Democrats have allowed themselves, even if by accident, to be in that position is a stupidity that defies belief.
This is especially so now that General Petraeus and his army are clearly carrying the day. One if his keys to success has been his tactic of encouraging division between Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda. It has worked to an astonishing extent. As things have quieted down in Iraq, the press has suddenly become very quiet as well. Up to now. But as can be seen by the TimesOnline editorial and by recent Associated press reporting, "Thousands Return to Safer Iraqi Capital," our fourth estate may be on the verge of concluding that their credibility depends on reporting the good news from Iraq as well as the sensational. Petraeus may be engineering a split between the Democrats and the press.
But, more likely we are just seeing the start of a course correction by both the U.S. mainstream press and the Democrats in the House and Senate. Of one thing we can be certain. The new direction will not be, as the TimesOnline suggests it ought to be, to make the most of the opportunity that a stable and democratic Iraq presents for quelling Middle East turmoil.
It will be all about damage control. It will be about finding a different angle for attacking the administration. Our mainstream press, which is its own 24/7 public relations machine, will spend the next year rewriting the history of the Iraq war. When they're done, they will have put themselves at least, and maybe the congressional Democrats, in a much better light.
They hope. On the other hand, that strategy could turn out to be another catastrophic miscalculation.
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