March 17, 2006
MSM Waking Up To Reality in Iraq?For a long while, you had to bypass the MSM and find alternative information sources to find out what really was happening in Iraq. Bloggers like Michael Yon were doing the real reporting that big media was either too lazy to do, or too mired in groupthink to contemplate.
Ralph Peters of the New York Post (here, here, here, here and here) and David Ignatius of the Washington Post have both spent time in Iraq and what they have found differs from the uniform "narrative" of irreversible failure that the MSM is trying to foist on the American public. We've covered Peters' reports before, but Ignatius' are worth reading, particularly since he cannot be termed anything remotely close to a conservative and his paper is a leading liberal media voice.
Today, Ignatius writes:
Three years on, the U.S. military is finally becoming adept at fighting a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Sadly, these are precisely the skills that should have been mastered before America launched its invasion in March 2003. It may prove one of the costliest lessons in the history of modern warfare.One can quibble with his assessment of timing. Obviously, we would all like more progress faster, but there's probably an entire debate that can be had to determine whether the proficiency of today's Iraqi army was possible three years ago.I had a chance to see the new counterinsurgency doctrine in practice here this week. U.S. troops are handing off to the Iraqi army a growing share of the security burden. As the Iraqis step up, the Americans are stepping back into a training and advisory role...
...this is the way this war is supposed to be going. It's a few years late, but the new U.S. strategy is moving in the right direction.
Yesterday, Ignatius wrote this:
There has been so much bad news out of Iraq lately that you have to pinch yourself when good things seem to be happening. But there are unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq's political leaders are taking the first tentative steps toward forming a broad government of national unity that could reverse the country's downward slide...There's still a lot of hard work ahead, but Ignatius notes that on both the military and political fronts, good progress is being made. Is it too much to ask that other MSM outlets look into whether he might be right?He [U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad] said of this week's gatherings: "These are the best meetings of Iraqis I've seen since I've been here."
The U.S. ambassador's upbeat account is believable because it is echoed by Iraqi political leaders...
The Iraqi political dialogue will move into a new and potentially fractious stage soon, when the leaders begin bargaining over who will hold top positions in the new government. Those negotiations could blow apart the fragile hopes for a unity government. But, for a change, pessimism isn't necessarily the right bet for Iraq.
Posted by Jonathan R. on March 17, 2006 11:04 AM
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