We read this from Ralph Peters today, and it made us think of an experiment:

Plenty of serious problems remain in Iraq, from bloodthirsty terrorism to the unreliability of the police. Iran and Syria indulge in deadly mischief. The infrastructure lags generations behind the country’s needs. Corruption is widespread. Tribal culture is pernicious. Women’s rights are threatened. And there’s no shortage of trouble-making demagogues.

Nonetheless, the real story of the civil-war-that-wasn’t is one of the dog that didn’t bark. Iraqis resisted the summons to retributive violence. Mundane life prevailed. After a day and a half of squabbling, the political factions returned to the negotiating table. Iraqis increasingly take responsibility for their own security, easing the burden on U.S. forces. And the people of Iraq want peace, not a reign of terror.

But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

We remembered that it was not too long ago that the media fixated on American casualties in Iraq. You recall Ted Koppel’s smarmy recitation of war dead; you remember the tick-tock to 1000, then 2000. What happened to that?

Could it be that the MSM gave up on the meme of US casualties because it wasn’t working in service of their anti-war agenda? Could it be that the idea of an Iraq Civil War was the replacement theme to depress domestic support for our effort in that country?

Here are the numbers. A search of “US casualties Iraq” in the NYT archives showed a usage 138% higher in 2004 versus 2006 year-to-date. A search of “Civil War Iraq” showed a usage 167% higher in 2006 versus 2004. The numbers are almost the mirror images of each other. Is this called reporting news, creating news, or something else?

UPDATE

Christopher Hitchens makes the point that civil war has been the strategy of the insurgency since the fall of Saddam:

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention (“to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates” and “accelerate the emergence of the Messiah”), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq’s largest confessional group that: “These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.”

Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. “Civil war” has replaced “the insurgency” as the proof that the war is “unwinnable.” But in plain truth, the “civil war” is and always was the chief tactic of the “insurgency.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under General, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.