What If a War Was Being Won & Nobody Reported It?
POSTED: Monday, November 19, 2007
FROM BLOG: California Conservative -
Speaking Out For The Silent Majority (TM)
The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.
Wasn’t that the question most bloggers were asking in the back of their minds? Certainly, Harry Reid, Christopher Dodd and John Murtha don’t want this reported. They don’t want it reported because, while it gets their name in the headlines, it also destroys their credibility on the subject. The bad news for Mssrs. Reid, Dodd and Murtha is that people are reporting on the progress in Iraq. This weekend, I wrote about a Chicago Tribune article written by Liz Sly. Here’s the first pull quote I used from her article:
Since the last soldiers of the “surge” deployed last May, Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation.
No longer do the streets empty at dusk. Liquor stores and cinemas have reopened for business. Some shops stay open until late into the evening. Children play in parks, young women stay out after dark, restaurants are filled with families and old men sit at sidewalk cafes playing backgammon and smoking shisha pipes.
The truth is finally seeping into the traditional media outlets’ news accounts. In fact, Ms. Sly’s article is a textbook refutation of the Democratic talking points on Iraq. I’m sure Ms. Sly’s article didn’t sit well with Sen. Reid.
As though that wasn’t enough, it gets worse for Mssrs. Reid, Dodd and Murtha because Rod Nordlund has written an article titled “Baghdad Comes Alive”, which describes the improving conditions in Baghdad.
For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable. “It’s hard to believe,” says a friend named Fareed, who has also gone and come back over the years to find the situation always worse, “but this time it’s really not.” Such words are uttered only grudgingly by those such as me, who have been disappointed again and again by Iraq, where a pessimist is merely someone who has had to endure too many optimists. It doesn’t help that no sooner have I written these words than my cup of coffee spills as a massive explosion shakes our building—the first blast near our place in weeks, and the more shocking for that. We grab body armor and helmets and await the all-clear. It is “only” an IED near the entrance to the Green Zone, targeting a U.S. convoy and killing two civilians and one American soldier.
The explosion is the exception to the rule—but one of the reasons the U.S. military is gun-shy about claiming success too soon. IED attacks across the country are at their lowest point since September 2004, down 50 percent just since the surge peaked last summer. There hasn’t been a successful suicide car bombing in Baghdad in five weeks, and the few ones in recent months have been small and ineffective. There used to be four a day, many of which claimed scores of lives each. “Very sustained trends,” the official military spokesman, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, says cautiously. “But it’s far too early to call this a statistically significant trend.”
So the following observations do not come so much from the brass: Al Qaeda in Iraq is starting to look like a spent force, especially in Baghdad. The civil war is in the midst of a huge, though nervous, pause. Most Shiite militias are honoring a truce. Iran appears to have stopped shipping deadly arms to Iraqi militants. The indigenous Sunni insurgency has declared for the Americans across broad swaths of the country, especially in the capital.
The Anbar Awakening isn’t a passing fad. It’s an emphatic statement to AQI that they’ve rejected AQI’s violence, that they’d rather have real lives spent with families than lives spent dying for ‘the cause’.
As Mr. Nordlund points out, Anbar isn’t the only place where a fragile, though seemingly durable peace seems to have broken out. Baghdad is now improving, though much work is still needed to solidify that peace.
People who have long lived like fugitives can now do the most normal things. Zuhair Humadi, a high-ranking Iraqi official who lives in the Green Zone, recently attended a public wedding celebration in Baghdad without a massive security detail. The Shorja bazaar in old Baghdad, hit by at least six different car bombs killing hundreds in the last year, is again crowded with people among the narrow tented stalls. On nearby Al Rasheed Street, the famous booksellers are back in business, after being driven into hiding by assassins and bombs. People are buying alcohol again—as they always had in Baghdad, until religious extremists forced many neighborhood liquor shops to close.
Despite all of this information seeping into the public’s view, Harry Reid keeps insisting that things aren’t going that well:
“Every place you go you hear about no progress being made in Iraq,” said Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid. “The government is stalemated today, as it was six months ago, as it was two years ago,” Reid told reporters, warning US soldiers were caught in the middle of a civil war. “It is not getting better, it is getting worse,” he said.
Christopher Dodd is taking it a step further:
“There is a lot of unease and disappointment,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who is running for president. “The perception is that we are not leading on this issue. I get it every single day, wherever I go.”
Mr. Dodd said lawmakers should just stop financing for the war. “Congress has one authority here, and that’s the funding,” he said. “The founders never intended for us as a body together to manage a conflict.” Mr. Dodd voted to block the spending measure.
Yesterday I asked the question “Why Are Democrats Opposed to Winning?” Following this weekend’s reporting from Ms. Sly and Mr. Nordlund, coupled with Christopher Dodd’s saying that Democrats should simple stop funding the war right when progress is being made and sustained, I have a different question:
Why is the Democratic leadership receptive only to defeat?
Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, John Murtha, Defeatocrats, Reporting, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Anbar Awakening, Baghdad
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
Read more from this blogger at California Conservative | Let us know what you think of this feature
