Anyone who hasn’t read the incredibly good column by Ralph Peters about the Iraq war, you’re missing out. He reflects on the current state of affairs in Iraq as we enter 2008, and how disgraceful the media coverage has been on the Iraq war since things have started turning around.
When the war was going badly it was on the front page of every paper in the country, but since the success of the troop surge your lucky to find it in the paper at all.
Of course, when someone is murdered or blown-up the war immediately returns to the front pages for as long as it takes to clean up the bodies.
As 2007 drew to a close, embarrassed journalists sought to play down American military successes and avoided questioning Democratic presidential contenders about their predictions of inevitable failure in Iraq. Magically, Iraq disappeared from the headlines – except on those rare occasions when a problem could be reported. At the close of a year of stunning progress, media stories on New Year’s Eve leapt to report that 2007 had been the deadliest year for US troops.
You had to read deep into the columns to learn that those casualties occurred in the first half of 2007, as we battled and defeated the terrorists and militias – or that, in recent months, American and Iraqi casualties have plummeted as a relative peace broke out.
Still, all that was just hushing up dirty family secrets in the media clan and an effort by left-leaning journalists and editors to protect the politicians they favor.
The greatest media story of 2007 was the one you never read (unless you read The Post): The year was a strategic catastrophe for Islamist terrorists – and possibly a historic turning point in the struggle against al Qaeda and its affiliates.
When the media realized that Iraq could no longer be used to flog the Bush Administration with on a daily basis, they immediately turned their sites to Afghanistan. When the U.S. is involved in military conflict, today’s media looks for a negative story anywhere it can find one.
The media has been slowly ramping up it’s negative coverage of Afghanistan, using misleading headlines and other tactics to mislead the public into thinking we’re losing yet another war.
Instead, as Iraq improved, we only heard how things were turning bad in Afghanistan. Political and media critics of our efforts to defeat Islamist terror attempt to discourage the American people (and voters) by downplaying progress anywhere and by raising the bar for success impossibly high.
As this column has maintained for years, Afghanistan is never going to become Iowa. Much of the country is still decades away from the electric light. Impoverished, backward and torn by three decades of war, it just isn’t going to meet civics-class norms anytime soon.
But the essential question regarding Afghanistan isn’t how closely Kandahar resembles Des Moines this week, but simply this: “Is Afghanistan a better place today, for the Afghan people and for our own security, than it was 9/10/01, when religious fanatics ruled the country and al Qaeda had a homeland?”
The answer, of course, is “Yes!”
But that won’t do for journalists or pols who’ve staked their reputations and careers on America’s failure. And now we’re seeing a shift to declaring all our efforts in vain because of the rising terror threat in Pakistan.
The media very much wants the public to be aware that the beginning of 2007 was the deadliest year for our troops in Iraq. What they don’t want the public to know and likely will never tell, is that 2007 was the deadliest year for terrorists worldwide since 2001.
-Chris Jones
