Right Pulse

Mark Steyn with Hugh Hewitt on the main stream media ignoring Iraq now that things are going well:

HH: The BBC this morning, a correspondent sort of recreating your jaunt into Fallujah after the war had concluded, the first phase, went with some Brits into Basra, and barely could conceal his surprise at how peaceful Basra has become in the last three months since the Maliki-ordered offensive. And he had a cup of tea, or he had some ice cream, they couldn’t get him any tea, in the middle of Basra. Do you think the world is quite aware of how extraordinary the changes in Iraq, Mark Steyn?

MS: No, because nobody wants to order up a script rewrite. Basically, the American networks, the big three plus CNN plus MSNBC, and then the rest of the world, BBC and Reuters and all the rest of it, decided that Iraq was a quagmire three or four years ago, and nothing is going to deflect them from that storyline. It’s like soap opera with no twists. And so the fact that the plot did change, the fact that essentially in three quarters of Iraq now, life is more pleasant than it has ever been, because of that, these guys have simply decided we’re not going to cover this story. There is no Iraq. Iraq is either a quagmire, or it’s no news at all. And it’s actually disgraceful. It does tell you a lot about the predisposition of what is meant to be a profession of inquiry, the predisposition of these so-called journalists to the store-bought storyline you warm up in the microwave every night, regardless of what’s actually happening on the ground.

The same could equally apply to the media in Australia.

Interesting snippet from Hoover fellow Tod Lindberg, speculating that a League of Democracies institution, as promoted by John McCain, may have been more effective at enforcing the original sanctions on Iraq. Presumably without China, Russia, and other like-minded typically undemocratic nations playing blockage on the sanctions enforcement agenda, Saddam may have been brought to account through peaceful means.

audio-here

I would further speculate that if the sanctions against Saddam had been effectively enforced, the need for the Iraq War would have dissipated in favour of more limited military action.

The New York Post published an article recently outlining the impending victory in Iraq for allied forces. I’m a little more cautious given the length of time it normally takes to complete a counter-insurgency campaign. The average in modern times is around 12 years - so it will be a while before US forces leave Iraq - much like during the Malayan Emergency which lasted over 12 years but petered out towards the end of the campaign. From the New York Post:

AMERICA has won, or is about to win, the Iraq war.

The latest proof came last month, as the Iraqi army - just a few months ago the target of scorn and abuse from Democratic politicians and journalists - forcefully reoccupied three cities that had served as key insurgency bases (Basra, Sadr City and Mosul).

Sunnis and Shias alike applauded as their nation’s army compelled insurgent militias to lay down their arms. The country’s leading opposition newspaper, Azzaman, led the applause for the move into Mosul - a sign that national reconciliation in Iraq is under way and probably irreversible.

Note that very little coverage is given to the Iraq War in Australia now.

I’ve yet to read an article that makes a convincing argument for withdrawal/retreat in Iraq. Even Rudd has not made the argument with his decision to leave over 1000 military personnel in support of Iraq, despite the withdrawal of the 500 strong Army battle group.

The number of prominent journalists coming out in support of the War is growing. The latest is 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright, who despite being opposed to the invasion is now saying:

… I am in the awkward political position of being opposed to withdrawing. I think we should stay there as long as we can to try to hold this entity together until they are able to remain stable, create a fairly reliable electoral process, police force, and that kind of thing, and take care of themselves. I don’t know if we can achieve that, but it’s hopeful to see that Iraq has been, you know, I don’t want to say that they’ve been put to death completely in Iraq, but they certainly are in retreat. And that’s critical, because if al Qaeda won in Iraq, who knows how far it would go.

So why can’t Rudd make a statement along a similar vein?

A recent report by the Democrat dominated US Select Committee on Intelligence found that the following pre-war claims about Iraq ”were substantiated by intelligence information” :

• Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories;
• Chemical weapons;
• Weapons of mass destruction overall;
• Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles;
• Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs;
• Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda;
• Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda; and
• Iraq’s contacts with al-Qaeda.

So the issue is about judgement, not about misleading the public. As the Washington Post put it:

In the report’s final section, the committee takes issue with Bush’s statements about Saddam Hussein’s intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

And yet we continue to suffer with the following reporting:

THE withdrawal of Australian combat troops from Iraq reopened old wounds yesterday, when Kevin Rudd accused the Coalition of taking the nation to war based on a lie.

Well Rudd did not say the ‘L’ word, but he did say the following in Hansard:

Of most concern to this government was the manner in which the decision to go to war was made: the abuse of intelligence information, a failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of that intelligence…

Abuse, and when has that claim ever been proven? Who is abusing the truth now?

Two times Pulitzer prize winner journalist John Burns, who spent 5 years reporting on the War in Iraq for the centre left newspaper the New York Times, commenting on the recent progress in Iraq:

Only 19 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq in May. Now that’s 19 families across the United States who have been absolutely devastated, and one has to be very careful how you address this problem. But if you compare it with the worst months of the war, for example, November, 2004, when there were 137 U.S. soldiers killed, if you compare it even with the sort of figures that were being reported in the early months of the surge, when those figures were well up into the 60s, 70s and 80s a month, it’s a remarkable turnaround. The levels of violence across Iraq, depending on the metric that you use, are very sharply down.

The markets are busy, the roads leading out of Iraq are heavy with traffic in both directions. You have to remember that Iraq is now earning vastly more money, as are all oil producing countries, from its oil. Saddam Hussein, I’m taking a risk here with the figures, but my recollection is that Saddam Hussein had very few years when he earned more than about $25 billion dollars in oil revenues, and that was when there was no war. Those revenues now are up in the $60-70 billion dollar range for a year.

It’s now commonplace in Washington, D.C., to say that the war was well on its way to being lost by December by 2006. And so you know, if you’d been a betting man, you’d have had to say that the odds were heavily against the kind of success that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have had there.

…the fact is that an enterprise which was attended by a great deal of skepticism when it began, a great deal of skepticism in Washington, D.C., in the Congress as you’ll recall, has had a remarkable success, which remains, as I think the phrase that General Petraeus used on the Hill a few weeks ago, it’s fragile and reversible.

True, anything could happen in the future, but given the success over the past 18 - 24 months it behooves leaders like Rudd not to seek appeasement from Iran and Syria by throwing Iraqis under a bus by withdrawing Australian combat troops.

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Nelson gave a great speech yesterday on Iraq, made Rudd look like a shy high school girl looking for a date hiding behind his speech papers. The contrast was stark, especially considering that foreign policy is meant to be Rudd’s speciality. Iraq was no mistake - no weapons of mass destruction (not including 500 sarin gas canisters and confirmed Israeli reports of WMD high tailing it to Syria), what about Saddam’s intent of forcing mass destruction on his own people? The public just need to see more of that contrast. From Nelson himself:

It is further a matter of fact that under Saddam Hussein over a 15-year period an average of 70,000 people were tortured, murdered and killed, including in two wars. Five thousand Kurds lost their lives in 1988 in the gassing at Halabja…there have been, according to US authorities, 260 mass graves found with as many as 300,000 dead Iraqis within them.

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From the Hugh Hewitt show, on independent war journalist Michael Yon’s new book ‘Moment of Truth in Iraq’, for anyone seeking retreat and therefore defeat in Iraq:

HH: You know, Michael Yon, I want to spend a little time on that. It’s a little bit out of order, but I’m going to jump ahead in the book to Page 136 where you’re talking about al Qaeda. And you’ve done a lot of work studying cults, you’ve done a lot of work studying gangs, all over the world. And you write on that page, “Iraqis love and greatly value their children. This makes children especially vulnerable as targets for terrorists. This is a brutal fact. The official had gone on to say that on a couple of occasions in Baquba, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy about eleven years old. When the family sat down to eat, their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family. My repeated attempts,” you write, “to verify this story failed to produce concrete proof, although many had heard similar stories. But the rumors showed how terrible al Qaeda’s reputation for atrocities had become among the local people.” And in another place, you write about exhuming a grave with Iraqi Security Forces, and in fact, you saw the evidence that they’re just butchers.

MY: They are. I mean, just a couple of days, or maybe one or two days before I heard that story, I was at a village just north of Baquba. It’s actually kind of contiguous with Baquba. And I published the grid coordinates of where this happened, actually. You know, al Qaeda had come in, the locals said it was al Qaeda, in the nearby places, and they had butchered everybody there. They had shot the adults, they had shot the animals, even, and beheaded the children. And I saw this with my own eyes. I photographed it. I made video and photos. It was unbelievable. I mean, they beheaded the children. So this is the kind of thing, you know, the Iraqis just have learned to hate al Qaeda. I mean, they are resurging, though, I mean, not all Iraqis. Not everybody’s gotten the memo yet, or the message. But a huge amount of them have just turned completely against al Qaeda. 

From Reuters:

A Kuwaiti man released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in 2005 has carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq, his cousin told Al Arabiya television on Thursday.

Which might help to explain Rudd’s ambivalence, now in power, towards released detainee David Hicks and his lawyer:

Mr Rudd’s government was probably being briefed “by the same spooks that were briefing the Howard government”, he said.

Thank goodness for the spooks.

Why is it that the left (small l liberals) are so concerned about freeing Tibet from Chinese Communist repression, but couldn’t care less about the people of Iraq? From The Corner:

Liberals, as are all Americans, are rightly angry over Tibet, but since a dictatorial communist China holds a substantial investment in U.S.-government-backed bonds, it is unlikely that any street protesting will lead to much more than a few meaningless resolutions in Congress, akin to the Armenian genocide flap with Turkey. But in Iraq, where we do have leverage and capability, an elected government is trying to ward off fundamentalist terrorists of all stripes — and yet from the recent reaction to the Petraeus/Crocker testimonies, liberals seem eager to leave the Iraqi democrats to fend for themselves.

If you’d like a taste of some home grown Australian hypocrisy then look no further than the organisation called GetUp! Chip in for Tibet, as GetUp! says, but when it comes to Iraq, well that’s a different story. Let tyranny reign there. Three democratic elections, tens of thousands dead and millions more having putting their lives on the line for their freedom and democracy apparently means nothing to the GetUp! people. They were just concerned about withdrawing 500 highly trained Australian Army personnel from Iraq. Troops who hardly needed GetUp!’s help in determining military strategy.