October 23, 2005
I Guess We Lost
I went out to breakfast today. Walking into the restaurant, I looked through the machine window at the Denver Post headlines, and I was surprised to read that the war had been lost in Iraq. The headline (rather small for such importance) read: "U.S. starts retreating from lofty Iraq goals" and the subhead was "Strategy for pullout outguns democracy"
Hmm, that doesn't look good, but I am not gonna give those commies at the Post a dollar of perfectly good money, so I read the article from home. It starts out pretty dire:
Washington - President Bush's goal of creating a united, peaceful Iraq that will serve as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East could take as long as a decade and cost thousands more Iraqi and American lives, administration officials say.A more modest objective is emerging for the near term, in which the security forces of an Iraq partitioned along ethnic and religious lines take over the war against a stubborn insurgency, allowing the United States to withdraw its combat forces.
Okay, is there news here? Who said we're retreating? What prompted this story? Reading on:
This scenario would leave a weakened central state apportioned into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite districts and bears its own risk: the possibility of a civil war that could spread into region- wide conflicts, analysts and government officials say.
Again, there is no news. This is a scenario most had long feared -- and a pretty good argument against cut and run. Who says we're pulling out? It seems Secretary of State Rice does:
"When you talk about the longer-term goal of a stable, democratic, multiethnic, unitary Iraq, that's going to take a long time," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate committee last week."The short-term goal is to make Iraqi forces capable enough of holding their own territory against insurgents so that there is not ... a threat to the political stability of the Iraqi regime," Rice said.
In an exchange with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Rice declined to quarrel with his definition of the short-term scenario as "a Kurdish north, a Shia (or Shiite) south and a disgruntled Sunni center that constituted a loose federation and was not engaged in all-out civil war but wasn't practicing the sort of democracy we enjoy here in the United States."
There you have it, Secretary Rice said it will be hard and take a long time (not news); and that the short-term plan was for a viable stable Iraq (is this news?); then, she failed to sufficiently correct a liberal Senator from the other party on a nebulous claim that didn't call for a specific rebuttal.
That's enough for The Denver Post! It's over! We're leaving Iraq to civil war and coming home -- you read about it here first!
No wonder everybody thinks we're losing. It's black-helicopterish of me to say this but such disinformation borders on treason.
If you ask why I believe Austin Bay and not the Post. That's fair, I would say that the progress I see with the Constitution, two successful elections, economic growth, &c. all match the more upbeat narratives I see online and do not match the MSM quagmire narrative.
Yes, almost 2000 brave men and women have given their lives for this cause. And the MSM is in full-tilt, macabre waiting for the 2,00th. It is not pointed out that that is in two years of combat. In two years, over 30,000 Americans have been murdered; more than 50,000 have died in traffic. In the two years the FDA diddled with the Erbitux application, 34,000 died needlessly from Colon Cancer. The Iraq casualty rate is not significantly higher than the normal rate for US Military training accidents!
The article continues with more worst case scenarios and more soi disant officials to give them currency. The Army is in bad shape, the economy is in a shambles, civil war would be bad (for those of you who need to read that in the paper, it appears that that might be quite unpleasant). No contrary position is offered, Nobody with a more sanguine assessment is quoted. It's a hit job, and half a million Denver area residents got it delivered to their door this Sunday morning.