Big News from Iraq Gets Not So Big Attention
From Wizbang
Sphere: Related ContentOne might think that an 80-95% decrease in war related deaths in Iraq would be a pretty darn big news. One thinking that would be wrong. Today’s media evidently doesn’t think it is a huge deal. At least it is being reported. It is just not being shouted with the fanfare reserved for increases in violence in Iraq. As George Will put it recently in a “must read” column:
Mainstream media types tend to think that, while rising casualties from Iraq are legitimate news, falling casualties are not. But even so the word got out: The surge strategy was producing results. Anbar province, given up for lost in 2006, turned peaceful and cooperative in 2007. U.S. casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties were down. Brookings scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, no fans of the administration’s conduct of the war, announced on July 30 (in the pages of The New York Times, no less) that this was “a war we might just win.”
Bob Owens pointed me to what Michael Yon has to say about it:
..No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.
Read the rest here - More from The Anchoress, Captain Ed, and Blackfive.
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