Pat Endorses Who?

fundingfather
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:04:49 +0000

FF, I’ve gone toe to toe responding to your conspiracy theories, writing responses with citations so long that I had to break them into three posts to get around CC’s 10K limit on individual posts.

It’s funny how you keep bringing up this exchange with the implication that quantity = quality. Yet you fail to acknowledge that every one of your supposed “points” was thoroughly refuted. But, if you want to continue living your life as the conquering hero of liberalism, so be it.

As to your other assertions about the difficulties in Iraq, you will be hard pressed to find any posts by me that would ever indicate that during much of 2006 and early 2007 that things were going well in Iraq. However, your post clearly puts you in the camp of Reid and Pelosi, the latter of whom recently said that “there was no light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq. Of course one will never perceive a light at the end of the tunnel if you keep your eyes tightly closed. I Think Michael Barone summarizes this perspective quite well:



When my father returned from service as an Army doctor in Korea in 1953, he brought back slides of the photos he’d shot, showing a war-torn country of incredible poverty. We would have laughed if you had told us that Americans would one day buy Korean cars. But 50-some years later, South Korea has the 13th-largest economy in the world, and you see Hyundais and Kias everywhere in America. Looking at things in micro-timeframes is not always a reliable guide to the macro-timeframe future.

So it may turn out to be with Iraq. We have been looking at Iraq in micro-timeframes — or, for many who oppose the war, frozen in the timeframe of late 2006. A better picture of the micro-timeframe is that we have achieved considerable success this year.

“The trend toward better security is indisputable,” writes the Associated Press. U.S. military and civilian deaths have declined sharply. Anbar province is pacified, Iraqis are streaming back to Baghdad, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run. Time’s Joe Klein, a critic of the administration, admits the gains and advises Democrats not to try to cut off funds. Conservative columnist Tony Blankley claims “a very real expectation that next year the world may see a genuine, old-fashioned victory in the Iraq war.”



You, Reid/Pelosi and most of the Democratic Party are stubbornly clinging to the 2006-view of the war, desperately afraid that you will be proven wrong.

Besides the posts that were highlighted by sjmom and myself, here are more things to consider (but, you will have to open your eyes to actually see it):



Nonetheless, the figures added to a body of evidence, compiled by American and Iraqi officials, indicating that the violence had diminished significantly since the United States reinforced troop levels in Iraq and adopted a new counterinsurgency strategy.

The data released Sunday cover attacks using car bombs, roadside bombs, mines, mortars, rockets, surface-to-air missiles and small arms. According to the statistics, roughly 575 attacks occurred last week.

That is substantially fewer than the more than 700 attacks that were recorded the week that Sunni militants set off a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq by blowing up a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006. And it represents a huge drop since June when attacks soared to nearly 1,600 one week.

American officials said other measures indicated that civilian deaths had dropped. Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a spokesman for the command, said civilian deaths had dropped by 60 percent since June.



“While violence is turning in the right direction, a tough fight remains ahead and progress will be uneven,” Admiral Smith said. “Violence is still too high in many areas of Baghdad and across Iraq.”

Still, he rattled off statistics that pointed to progress in lowering violence. Casualties suffered by Iraqi security forces, he said, were down 40 percent since the beginning of the troop reinforcement plan. Civilian fatalities in Baghdad, he said, were down 75 percent in recent months. In some areas, the attacks have not been so low since the spring and summer of 2005.

Since the violence has decreased in Baghdad people have begun trickling back into cafes and streets in the hope that the calm will last.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin



Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.

**When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times./b

“I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers,” Mr. Benedetto said. “While some students said yes … most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous.”

Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because “things are going annoyingly well.”

Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the ‘narrative of defeat,’ " he wrote in National Review.

If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: “The trend toward better security is indisputable.” It’ll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.

“We’ve won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version,” said the Mudville Gazette’s “Greyhawk,” a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq.

[It’s true: Iraq is a quagmire](http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07322/834685-373.stm)