News and Commentary on Politics, Media and Culture

If I were to put on my mainstream media hat I would write an article about Iraq under the current title. It is the only article I would write, repeatedly and with context; the kind of context that supports my title. Nothing more, nothing less.

Every now and then I would reluctantly slip in an article about the good merely to present the facade of balance. But that would be rare.

To be sure, the war in Iraq brings little in the form of good news by our standards. But the war in Iraq is not about everyday standards in the United States, a normal life where one doesn’t fear being hunted down for having the wrong political opinion, a normal day in school where desks are not used for shields or the prospect of taking a stroll to the market and actually making it back home alive to enjoy dinner. That is the story of hope. It is supposed to be the story of Iraq after we have liberated the country from the grip of terror. For millions in pre-war Iraq it was the story of hope before we removed the iron fisted rule of Saddam Hussein.

Today’s good news has to be measured in degrees of evil. Killings are down, some members of a family are spared instead of all being slain or a suicide bomber only managed to blow himself up or killed fewer innocent people than he had hoped.

So as you see hope is the key to everything here. It dictates expectations, helps us measure progress and provides the basis for how we report the news. If I hope things will get better I will look for stories that will indicate the possibility. If however I hope for failure to prove a point such as opposition to the war, then well, you know, I will obscure signs of progress and only look for signs that show hopelessness.

Democrats in Congress and their supporters in the mainstream media fall into that second category. I don’t believe they actually hoped for failure so much as they hoped to be able to craft a message. A safe bet that could be cashed in no matter which way their supporters leaned. Thus the original vote to support the war in Iraq was based on the appearance of hope that quickly transformed down a path of angst, to anger, to blame and hopelessness. This is the bad and ugly reality of political expediency that would never settle for victory once a stance had been taken in opposition.

Regardless of that stance however there is still hope. The New York Times reported on progress in the Anbar province over the weekend. The article is tentative in tone but it is one of progress nonetheless.

RAMADI, Iraq — Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.

“Many people are challenging the insurgents,” said the governor of Anbar, Maamoon S. Rahid, though he quickly added, “We know we haven’t eliminated the threat 100 percent.”

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. With the tribal leaders’ encouragement, thousands of local residents have joined the police force. About 10,000 police officers are now in Anbar, up from several thousand a year ago. During the same period, the police force here in Ramadi, the provincial capital, has grown from fewer than 200 to about 4,500, American military officials say.

At the same time, American and Iraqi forces have been conducting sweeps of insurgent strongholds, particularly in and around Ramadi, leaving behind a network of police stations and military garrisons, a strategy that is also being used in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, as part of its new security plan.

Yet for all the indications of a heartening turnaround in Anbar, the situation, as it appeared during more than a week spent with American troops in Ramadi and Falluja in early April, is at best uneasy and fragile.

Municipal services remain a wreck; local governments, while reviving, are still barely functioning; and years of fighting have damaged much of Ramadi. - NY Times, Uneasy Alliance Is Taming One Insurgent Bastion

The newspaper seems to be a bit reluctant in reporting progress and why wouldn’t it? Such stories don’t make the NY Times most e-mailed list and thus don’t reflect the hopes of its reader base. That is usually occupied by stories of hopelessness such as the current number 10 title holder, Inspectors Find Rebuilt Projects Crumbling in Iraq.

But the bad and ugly is only as bad as it appears because of the missing reports on the side of good. Apart from the uncharacteristic message of tentative progress in the New York Times we find very little in that realm emanating from the mainstream media. Which makes one wonder what messages are being missed and more importantly, why?

Stories of hope are out there and they are not without cause and effect. A Scottish newspaper reported on Saturday that infant mortality in Afghanistan has fallen a stunning 40,000 babies per year since we ousted the Taliban. Women’s access to medical care has improved and reconstruction efforts are forging results. The story is the result of a study by John Hopkins University here in the United States. So one has to wonder why it only made it’s way into a Scottish newspaper. I have my idea why; hopelessness can’t tolerate progress.

INFANT mortality in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically since the demise of the Taleban, according to a new study, with 40,000 fewer babies dying every year.

Improvements in women’s access to medical care since the Taleban were ousted from power five years ago was cited as the main reason for the death rate becoming significantly lower.

Grim infant and maternal mortality rates have been regularly cited as evidence of Afghanistan’s backwardness after decades of war.

They were also seen as a sign of the slow progress of the internationally funded reconstruction effort.

According to the preliminary results of a Johns Hopkins University study, the infant mortality rate has declined to about 135 per 1,000 live births in 2006, down from an estimated 165 per 1,000 in 2001.

The researchers “found improvements in virtually all aspects of care in almost every province,” the public health ministry and World Bank said in a joint statement on the findings.

This news certainly can’t be classified as either bad or ugly. Unfortunately most of you probably haven’t heard of it.

For every bit as bad and ugly as the war in Iraq is it could not be perpetuated without the help of those who peddle the message of hopelessness. This is the fuel that breaks the will to find hope; the will to win.

One of the best balanced sources of all sides of the good, the bad and the ugly is embedded journalist Michal Yon. His latest dispatch surpasses anything the mainstream media is providing.

Most of the families in the vicinity have fled. People are murdered nearby every day, and during just one of the days I was with 1-4 Cavalry, they reported finding three murder victims. The Iraqi Police and our soldiers told me that murders are down since the security plan began, yet our people still found fourteen human bodies over the period of one week. The enemy kills entire families including small children.

On these empty streets it becomes clear that the war that began in March 2003 has been lost to rampant crime, civil war and the sundry insurgencies that have shorn the Iraqi fabric. But while our fire brigades pour up from Kuwait into Iraq, and while our allies pull out one by one, we are reinvading Iraq with not a second wave but a “surge” of brigade after brigade barreling up IED-laced highways. Ten thousand more troops, then ten thousand more, then maybe ten thousand more again. And those troops who are already here will stay longer than planned. Then longer than planned, again. (One way to get more troops into Iraq is to stop letting them go home. The announcement to extend current deployments was made after I wrote this dispatch.)

People talk of an Army breaking under the strain, but while there remains a sliver of hope that Iraq might avoid conflagration into full-scale genocide, out here, where bones splinter and flesh really does burn, there is a kind of clarity. And on these empty streets, a practiced eye regards the slivers of hope that are strewn among all the shards of broken glass.

The latest group of professional soldiers I had the honor of accompanying was the 1-4 Cavalry from Fort Riley, Kansas. They opened their doors in Baghdad and wanted me to tell the people at home the good, the bad and the ugly. They didn’t hold back; they provided plenty of all three. In one neighborhood where residents have been subject to a methodical slaughter, our people found an abandoned Christian college that had already proved itself the proverbial island in the storm.

The Pontifical Babel College, its name so suggestive of all things Iraq—Babel, the Tower of Babel, Babylon, Babylonia—a place where the meaning of words evaporates almost as soon as they are spoken into the dry desert air. The 1-4 Cavalry would spend the next few days transforming it into COP Amanche, a place where the actions of soldiers conveyed the meaning of their presence and where a practiced eye reads the reactions of civilians as glints and flashes of what could be.

So there you have it. The mainstream media doesn’t have to stick to the formula of only reporting the bad and the ugly; it is a choice. Perhaps if they would branch out a little and report on some of the good we too could see the realities of what could be. Until then we are prisoners of their message of hopelessness that is unfortunately all too bad and very ugly.

Related: Captains Quarters, Wizbang, 186K Per Second, Hot Air, Right Wing News

 Send this post a Friend  

Trackback URI | Comments RSS