Over the course of the Iraq War, many U.S. media outlets have managed to misconstrue Iraqi public opinion about the presence of U.S. troops. As early as 2004, as FAIR (6/2/04) pointed out, research showed that the Iraqi public wanted U.S. troops out: According to a new poll from the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is partly funded by the State Department and has coordinated its work with the Coalition Provisional Authority, more than half of all Iraqis–including the Kurds–want an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, up from 17 percent last October. But prominent media outlets didn't [...]
Sep
06
2011
Richard Cohen Is Sorry You and He Got It Wrong
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he's sorry: I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war–against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term. Wait–we all [...]
Sep
01
2011
NYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here
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(UPDATE: Today's Times includes a story about the WikiLeaks Iraq cable, under the somewhat strange headline "Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians." Still very little in the rest of the press– nothing on television, according to a search of the Nexis database). One of the main media tropes regarding WikiLeaks' release of State Department cables last year was that there was either nothing new to be learned, or that private conversations they revealed were remarkably consistent with what U.S. officials were saying publicly. That was totally misleading, but for many pundits the story seemed to end there. Now [...]
Aug
26
2011
Zakaria, Libya and Iraq: Don't Remember What I Wrote
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Fareed Zakaria cheers the Libya War in Time magazine this week for not following the Iraq model: It has been prosecuted with the memory of the Iraq war firmly in mind. Only this time the approach has been to view the last war as a negative example. The international coalition–and even the Libyan opposition–is doing pretty much the opposite of what was done in Iraq. Zakaria explains that Obama "was clearly trying to avoid the mistakes of Iraq." Among the mistakes the Bush administration made: Had UN weapons inspectors been given more time in the spring of 2003, the UN [...]
Aug
04
2011
Anonymous Frankness at the Washington Post
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U.S. officials seem to be making progress in convincing Iraqi politicians to let some troops stay in Iraq beyond the December withdrawal deadline. The Washington Post weighs in today (8/4/11) and gets some anonymous straight talk: "There seems to be broad partnerships and political coalitions emerging that take tough decisions," said a senior U.S. Embassy official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue frankly. Of course, one way of reading that justification for anonymity is that an official speaking on the record would be less than frank. If that's worth granting a source anonymity, then it [...]
Jul
25
2011
Mistakes, Madeleine Albright and Dead Iraqi Children
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Newsweek has a feature called "My Favorite Mistake," where a famous person talks about something they've done wrong.http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-admin/edit.php This week (7/24/11) it's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The mistake she cited was when she wore the wrong pin to a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then said something critical about his Chechnya policy. (The best mistakes are the most self-serving ones, apparently.) When I saw the headline, I was half-wondering if she'd talk about her famous defense of killing Iraqi children on 60 Minutes (5/12/96): Leslie Stahl asks Albright: "We have heard that half a million children [...]
Jul
11
2011
WaPost: Iraq 'Complicates' Withdrawal by Sticking to Plan
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The current Status of Forces agreement calls for U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by the end of the year. The U.S. government wants to stay longer, and would seem to be pressuring the Iraqi government to ask them to do just that. But the Iraqi government hasn't done that yet–leading to stories like this one in theWashington Post by Karen DeYoung (7/10/11), headlined "Iraqis Fail to Reach Consensus on Longer U.S. Troop Presence." The "failure" is that they haven't written a new agreement that would negate the current agreement. The Post presents this all as a strategic problem [...]
May
19
2011
Gingrich's Gaffes and Wesley Clark's
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The New York Times' Michael Shear has a piece today (5/19/11) reminding readers that presidential candidates often have early stumbles of the sort that Newt Gingrich has been having. He recalls several examples, most of which don't really offer much hope for Gingrich. One is Wesley Clark's brief 2004 campaign: In 2004, General Clark's campaign was premised on his military credentials and his critique of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. So when the general said, within days of announcing, that he might have voted to authorize the Iraq War, it was a big deal. That's not exactly [...]
May
10
2011
The Iraq War's New 'Complications'
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The Washington Post today (5/10/11) has a perplexing article by Aaron Davis about U.S. troops leaving Iraq. Here's the lead: BAGHDAD — The United States' pleas for Iraq's government to decide "within weeks" whether American troops should stay beyond a year-end deadline to leave will not be met, Iraqi politicians say, complicating plans for the U.S. military withdrawal. If the deadline to extend U.S. troop presence is not extended, then (if I'm to understand what the words mean) U.S. troops have to leave, as they're planning on doing. How does that "complicate" anything? There's a political problem in Iraq, in [...]
May
10
2011
The Shifting Standard for Indiscriminate Killing
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I was struck by the contrast between two passages I came across recently: Misurata's population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people–including combatants–have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22–less than 3 percent–are women. If Gadhafi were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties. –Alan J. Kuperman (Boston Globe, 4/14/11) In a report to be published in tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have concluded that air strikes [in Iraq] by U.S.-led coalition forces have killed mostly women and children. Thirty-nine percent were children, while 46 percent [...]
May
05
2011
Did the WaPo Hire Sean Hannity?
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OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you: In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years The piece–actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut–lays out the argument: As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor [...]
Apr
13
2011
Friedman, Iraq and the U.S. Referee
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Tom Friedman, writing today about the Arab Spring (4/13/11–the same column Jim Naureckas critiqued for FAIR Blog here): Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states. It's been a while since I've played an organized sport, but if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail. That analogy sounded familiar, though. Turns [...]
Apr
08
2011
NYT Calls for Protecting Libyan Civilians by Escalating War–Like in Fallujah
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Afraid of NATO killing civilians in Libya? The New York Times editorial page (4/8/11) sees the way forwardby ramping up the war: There is a much better option: the American A-10 and AC-130 aircraft used earlier in the Libya fighting and still on standby status…. But no other country has aircraft comparable to Americaâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s A-10, which is known as the Warthog, designed to attack tanks and other armored vehicles, or to the AC-130 ground-attack gunship, which is ideally suited for carefully sorting out targets in populated areas. AC-130s were used frequently in the Iraq War, particularly in the bloody fight [...]
