Wars and rumors

  • Looks like we’re look­ing to down­scale our troop involve­ment in Iraq.

    Then again, maybe not. Wars and rumors of wars, right? Press cov­er­age of the war on ter­ror­ism has rarely seemed to be on the mark to me. Reporters seem to want to blame that on bad com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I blame it at least as much on their propen­sity to want to print the story they want. Bad num­bers, embar­rass­ments and atroc­i­ties, hor­ror and fail­ure — yep, that would be the story. Any­thing besides that — point­less diver­sion. Or even an inten­tional redi­rect tac­tic by an embat­tled White House.

    Occa­sion­ally, that may even be the story. But the press seems like a clock that’s stuck on one time — they’ll be right at least twice a day, but it doesn’t mean they’re not bro­ken.

    I much pre­fer those few avenues that give infor­ma­tion and ana­lyze the pat­terns that are occur­ring with­out try­ing to jump to a lot of con­clu­sions, and that only seems avail­able in the alter­na­tive media. For instance, I thought this arti­cle (via Strat­egy Page) was interesting:

    The blood­shed in Iraq is get­ting worse, and involv­ing U.S. troops less and less….The ter­ror­ists rarely get a shot at Amer­i­can troops any more. But Iraqi civil­ians are another mat­ter, and the usual tar­get these days are peo­ple who can’t defend them­selves. The gov­ern­ment is try­ing to rein in the death squads formed within the police (for the most part) and army (much more rare). But this is hard. The gov­ern­ment has not been able to shut down the Sunni Arab ter­ror­ists and crim­i­nal gangs either. Peo­ple don’t feel safe, espe­cially in mixed Sunni/Shia neigh­bor­hoods and vil­lages. The ter­ror­ists also abuse Sun­nis Arabs who do not sup­port the killers.

    And by the way, the largely unasked ques­tion is, are we win­ning or los­ing the war? No one wants to put it in those terms, because it sounds like it reduces the whole thing to the sta­tus of a foot­ball game. But it’s another of those ugly truths about wars: some­one wins, some­one loses. The ones that look like stale­mates just mean that the whole thing will hap­pen again until they come to a deci­sive con­clu­sion (think WWI and WWII, or Gulf War and Iraq War). As hor­ri­ble as it is to con­tem­plate — and really, what about war isn’t hor­ri­ble to con­tem­plate? — both sides are bet­ter off if it doesn’t end in some sort of tie.

    Not that that would be much of a pos­si­bil­ity with Mus­lims on one side. But if we’re sup­posed to take our casu­alty num­bers and the con­tin­u­a­tion of insur­gent action as signs of fail­ure, it looks like al-Zarqawi didn’t get the memo:

    As an over­all pic­ture, time has been an ele­ment in affect­ing neg­a­tively the forces of the occu­py­ing coun­tries, due to the losses they sus­tain eco­nom­i­cally in human lives, which are increas­ing with time. How­ever, here in Iraq, time is now begin­ning to be of ser­vice to the Amer­i­can forces and harm­ful to the resistance …

    That’s what he wrote in a let­ter found in his flat­tened hide-out. Whole story is here. And as for why that story is so under­re­ported … as I said, I don’t think much of the legacy media these days.


    Related posts:

    1. Why I don’t think the war is a failure
    2. Why Amer­ica must stay
    3. Bush’s great speech
    4. Heck­uva speech going on
    5. And the win­ner of the blame game is …

    June 22nd, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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