Crush Liberalism

We’re winning in Iraq, and the MSM’s silence is proof

Excellent column by Rich Lowry:

Forget the briefings from generals, the intelligence evaluations and the Pentagon status reports. There is a handy indicator for whether the war in Iraq is going well — its relative absence from the front pages.

During the past month, the country’s top newspapers have splashed Iraq stories on Page A-1, but most of them have had to do with the scandal concerning the security contractor Blackwater and the impending (but yet to materialize) Turkish invasion of the Kurdish north. Reports on major trends in the war tend to be relegated to inside pages because — from the blows dealt to al-Qaeda, to the rise of Sunni security volunteers, to Muqtada al-Sadr’s cease-fire — they have been largely positive.

In Israel, there’s a law that bans reporting on sensitive national-security operations; you could be forgiven for thinking that the U.S. has a similar ban on any encouraging news from the hottest battlefront in the war on terror. The United States might be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the “narrative of defeat.”

I love that term: “reverse-propaganda”!  I may just steal that…er, I mean, “use for evaluation purposes only”…for future use.  Continuing:

…Seemingly every day brings a new encouraging number. The latest is that rocket and mortar attacks in Iraq have fallen to their lowest level in nearly two years. The Left’s initial reaction to the surge’s success in reducing violence in Iraq was to declare Gen. David Petraeus a liar. Now, a new tack has become necessary — finding creative ways to deny credit to the surge. Democrat Rep. David Obey from Wisconsin says insurgents are simply “running out of people to kill.”

So between January and today everyone who could die in violence in Iraq perished? This is childish. It is true that the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad neighborhoods, once it is complete, creates a perverse kind of stability. But the reduction in violence has happened all around the country, in all-Sunni areas as well as in areas in parts of Baghdad that are still ethnic fault lines.

As Kagan writes, U.S. forces interposed themselves between warring factions in Baghdad, and on the outskirts of the city, attacked al-Qaeda strongholds. This is why American casualties went up earlier this year and now — with al-Qaeda on the run — are back down. As security has taken hold, the Sunnis have felt comfortable partnering with American forces to battle al-Qaeda.
…
Bush repeatedly has said that there will be no ceremony on the deck of a battleship to mark victory over al-Qaeda; when it comes to any eventual victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq, not only will there be no ceremony, we’ll be lucky to get a headline.

Nope…no liberal media bias!

November 14, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | defeatism, Iraq, media bias