The Media’s Surge Spin
by Pamela LeaveyThere’s a hefty amount of “surge” spin happening in the media right now, in anticipation of the release of Gen. David Petraeus’ s pending White House assessment of the Iraq war’s progress, which will be officially unveiled before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees on the 6th anniversary of 9/11. The media has been handpicking sound-bites and quotes from various Democratic leaders and presidential candidates to boost and support the Republican Noise Machine’s pre-release spin on the “surge” report.
In Wednesday’s WaPo, Jonathan Weisman and Anne Kornblut report that in Hillary Clinton’s speech to the VFW she said:
“We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Anbar province, it’s working,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday.
But they left out the caveat which Tim Grieve noted in Salon:
Clinton went on to say that the United States alone cannot “impose a military solution” on Iraq; that the Iraqis are not “ready to do what they have to do for themselves yet”; that it is “unacceptable for our troops to be caught in the crossfire of a sectarian civil war while the Iraqi government is on vacation”; that it’s “time the Iraqi government took responsibility for themselves and their country, because the American people and our American military cannot want freedom and stability for the Iraqis more than they want it for themselves”; and that the “best way” to honor the men and women who have served in Iraq is “by beginning to bring them home and making sure that when they come home that we have everything ready for them.”
It’s bad enough the media is cherry picking statements to prop up Bush’s failed surge, but even John Edwards campaign manager, David Bonior, got into the Noise Machine’s game of twisting Clinton’s words from her speech to the VFW when he said, “Senator Clinton’s view that the President’s Iraq policy is ‘working’ is another instance of a Washington politician trying to have it both ways. You cannot be for the President’s strategy in Iraq but against the war. The American people deserve straight talk and real answers on Iraq, not double-speak, triangulation, or political positioning.”
Bonior is right, the American people do deserve “straight talk” and not “political positioning” which is of course why it was wrong for Bonior to take Clinton’s words out of context.
As Tim Grieve said in Salon on the “surge” spin: “While it’s certainly in the Bush administration’s interests to conflate the questions and confuse the answers, the White House has people on staff paid to do just that. Journalists aren’t supposed to be doing it for them.”
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Well we’ve surrendered to the Sunnis and that seems to be working fairly well. Except for the fact that, because we no longer fight them, we are perceived by the Shiites to be a new enemy. Now the Shiites have taken some of their guys off of the job of driving Sunnis out of their homes in mixed neighborhoods, and assigned them to using their new improved IED’s to blow up U.S. soldiers. Al Sadr mostly ignored us while he was consolidating his control over Iraq, but now he kills us while he’s consolidating his control. One might call that a vastly improved situation, and some do, but mostly only people who have a lot invested in fooling either themselves or the rest of us.
It looks like the next thing to do is to surrenender to Al Sadr. That should bring casualities down to the point where we realsitically could declare victory and get out. It’s a little different approach than it looked like Bush favors, but it does give him most of what he went in to Iraq for originally. It insures the creation of enough chaos to keep the price of oil at nicely elevated levels for the entire forseeable future.