Sunday, September 26, 2004
Conventional wisdom
The massive, avoidable failure of the Bush admin in Iraq should now be the conventional wisdom. The burden of proof has been met; straight news articles can and should take it is as the received wisdom. We're past the "two sides to the issue" point; if someone wants to argue that Iraq is actually all rose petals, they should be treated with skepticism until they can produce some evidence or argument to support their fanciful reassurances.
If someone today argued the Vietnam war was a good idea, or successful, or waged well, any straight news article reporting that opinion would feel obliged to point out that everyone is quite sure Vietnam was a costly, murderous, wasteful, tragic fiasco it would have been better to avoid.*
We've reached that point in Iraq. Here's a sampling of today's news:
As Matthew Yglesias puts it:
Instead, we have cowards like the folks at CBS, who have decided it would be
inappropriate to point out that the war has failed to meet any of its rationales, lest that affect voters opinion of the president. Readers surely know that CBS made a fool of itself recently by broadcasting obviously fake memos regarding the president's National Guard "service". Clearly, CBS has decided the best way to restore its journalistic integrity is to follow the model of Pravda.
*Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth", this means you
If someone today argued the Vietnam war was a good idea, or successful, or waged well, any straight news article reporting that opinion would feel obliged to point out that everyone is quite sure Vietnam was a costly, murderous, wasteful, tragic fiasco it would have been better to avoid.*
We've reached that point in Iraq. Here's a sampling of today's news:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 25 - Seven Iraqi men applying for jobs with the Iraqi National Guard were ambushed and killed in western Baghdad on Saturday morning, while the United States military said four marines and a soldier had been killed over 24 hours.
The military also said it conducted two airstrikes early and late on Saturday in the volatile city of Falluja to kill militants holding meetings. The military said the targets were members of the network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant.
The Americans did not give any casualty estimates, but doctors in the emergency room of the main Falluja hospital said 9 people were killed in the first strike and 16 wounded, all of them civilians. They said the first strike took place in a residential area of eastern Falluja and one woman and a child were among the dead.
...
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 26 — The American military said today that it had arrested a senior commander of the nascent Iraqi National Guard, raising concerns about the loyalty and reliability of the new security forces just months before general elections are scheduled to be held across the country.
The Iraqi commander, Brig. Gen. Talib Abid Ghayib al-Lahibi, based in the restive Diyala province, was arrested last Thursday for "having associations with known insurgents," the military said in a written statement.
...
And this from the leader of Pakistan:
ZAHN: Is the world a safer place because of the war in Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: No. It's more dangerous. It's not safer, certainly not.
ZAHN: How so?
MUSHARRAF: Well, because it has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It's aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous.
As Matthew Yglesias puts it:
Why Do They Hate Us?
Possibly because we keep killing them. Via Laura Rozen comes an eye-opening Knight-Ridder story on civilian casualties:
Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.
According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.
Apparently one man's counterinsurgency is another man's dead brother. And guess which side that man's going to fight for? As a hint, let me suggest it's not the side that killed his brother.
Instead, we have cowards like the folks at CBS, who have decided it would be
inappropriate to point out that the war has failed to meet any of its rationales, lest that affect voters opinion of the president. Readers surely know that CBS made a fool of itself recently by broadcasting obviously fake memos regarding the president's National Guard "service". Clearly, CBS has decided the best way to restore its journalistic integrity is to follow the model of Pravda.
*Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth", this means you
