Robert Parry: Commercial Media Let McCain Get Away With Claims That The "Surge" Has Worked

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/98171/commercial_media_let_mccain_get_away_with_claims_that_the_%22surge%22_has_worked

Commercial Media Let McCain Get Away with Claims that the "Surge" has Worked

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted September 10, 2008.

McCain is falsely clinging to his support of more troops in Iraq as the reason for decreasing violence. And the media is buying it.

Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the "surge" was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq's violence. It's also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the "surge" idea early.

Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised -- even badgered -- for opposing the "surge." His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.

The latest example came during an ABC News "This Week" interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: "How do you escape the logic that ... John McCain was right about the surge?"

When Obama responded that he didn't understand "why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five," Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying "Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?"

In other words, the big-name journalists don't want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the "surge" has virtually won the war.

- snip -

As Woodward writes, "In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge."

Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.

A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.

But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents -- such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones -- with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects.

Successful Repression

As we've reported previously, other brutal factors -- that the Washington press corps almost never mentions -- help explain the decline in violence:

Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.

Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made "death-squad" raids more difficult but alshave "cantonized" much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.

During the "surge," U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called "military age males" and locking up tens of thousands in prison.

Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.

With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the "successful surge" is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush's propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.

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[breathedeeply]

1. excellent post thanks

excellent post thanks

[KharmaTrain]

2. Success On A Failure? That's A Success?

When I play with a wingnut about Iraq (and there are fewer and fewer these days) and this chestnut about the "surge working" comes up, I have a lot of fun. I just start them backtracking...as to why the surge was needed and whose fault was it. Wasn't this invasion supposed to be a "cakewalk" and we'd be greeted as "liberators"? So what went wrong? Could it have been the disasterous policy to disband the Iraqi Army by Bremmer and cheney? Or the disastrous destruction of Fallujah? Or Abu Grahb? So what success was made by this "surge"? Violence is down? Fine...then let's get the hell out...set up the victory parades and lets go. If we can't leave then what's wrong? Something obviously didn't succede.

Add water, rinse and repeat and needed...and watch the wingnut spin into thin air.

[moondust]

3. Misleading journalism.

You can't have an informed electorate and a lasting democracy if the media accept and perpetuate simplistic bullshit as they have obviously done here. Can we vote them out?

[Hissyspit]

4. kick - useful info. n/t