If A Tree Falls In Iraq, And No One Is There To Hear It...

This David Brooks op-ed and this analysis of network news coverage on Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't be more related. Brooks wants us to believe that the surge made everything all better in Iraq when anyone who's actually been paying attention knows that the drop in violence did nothing to bring the country together or reconcile the disparate factions, and we're essentially keeping our finger in the dike until we eventually must leave, without any idea what will happen afterwards. Now, even readers of the New York Times are not likely to know that, because Iraq has been blocked from our memories.

The three major US networks are only dedicating an average of 2 minutes per week to coverage of the war in Iraq according to the New York Times. The report is based on information gathered by a TD consultant who found that CBS evening news spent the least amount of time reporting on the Iraq war, followed by ABC world news and NBC nightly news, respectively.

Among the information not reaching US citizens is that there have been more than 1 million Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the 2003 US invasion, with anywhere from 600 000 to 1.2 million of them being violent. The underreporting of events in Iraq has also left US citizens largely unaware of the millions of Iraqi widows of war and 5 million displaced Iraqi citizens. Some direct blame at the Pentagon for the US public's ignorance of the large number of deaths, but Donald Rumsfeld defends the Department of Defense by insisting that they "don't do body counts on other people."

It isn't just Iraqis that are going unnoticed, however. The US news is even failing to report or show their own soldiers returning home in body bags. Lara Logan, a foreign correspondent for CBS news commented on this issue asking "who in America knows what [the body of a dead American soldier] looks like" and saying that "the American soldiers do feel forgotten."

Of course they feel forgotten - they ARE forgotten. And they've been used as political pawns by people like Brooks for over five years.

This idea that a drop in violence - but not a cessation, mind you, more Americans died just today and there are still upwards of 500 casualties a month, the equivalent of two 9-11s every single month, inside Iraq - takes the war out of the spotlight and allows Bush defenders and warmongers to claim victory is silly, especially because they keep Iraq in the sweet spot between "everything's dandy" and "if we leave there will be nothing but chaos." Those two positions are irreconcilable. There are a number of factors leading to the drop in violence, but an additional American presence is something that Howard Dean was calling for in 2003. And anyway, the larger point is that we're not creating an Iraq that is sustainable without that very large presence, which does not serve our national security in any way. As Matthew Duss puts it:

Leaving aside the fact that [the surge's] "victory" as Gerecht defines it, in addition to obviously representing a monumental climbdown from each and every one of the numerous justifications previously offered for the war, does not actually add up to "an Iraqi state" as much as to "a series of armed militia communities we're going to call Iraq," was this outcome really worth 4,000 American dead, over 28,000 wounded, and, by the end of 2008, some $600 billion in American treasure? Was it worth over half a million Iraqi dead, many times that maimed, and some 3 million displaced? Was it worth creating an open source laboratory for terrorists to develop and sharpen their tactics against the most technologically advanced military in the world, enabling them disseminate those tactics around the world via internet? Was it worth losing a thousand dollars at poker just to win twenty at blackjack?

This is reinforced by a GAO report released yesterday showing no long-term strategy for the war, outside of maintaining fragile security gains. This is a prelude to a long-term occupation but not the withdrawal we all know must come absent a military draft.

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the "New Way Forward" strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

Bush's strategy of January 2007, the GAO said, "defined the original goals and objectives that the Administration believed were achievable by the end of this phase in July 2008." Not meeting many of them changed circumstances on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said. The GAO recommends that the State and Defense departments work together to fashion a new approach.

But David Brooks wants to tell you that Bush was right, the surge is working, and will not address the larger concerns. And you'll never see this on the nightly news unless you're very lucky. You may hear something like commanders in Afghanistan lamenting the lack of equipment because of Iraq, but the context of how we have no national security goals in Iraq, but plenty in Afghanistan, and the imbalance is striking and completely perverse, will not get a hearing. Afghanistan CLEARLY needs more help. Attacks are up 40% in some regions, and more US troops died there than in Iraq last month. What Iraq needs more than anything is an exit strategy. The government is not functional, the state is not cohesive, and no amount of military referees policing, arming and funding all sides of a potential civil war is going to reconcile these facts.

Brooks creates a hermetically sealed open-and-shut case, but it's, for lack of a better word, an ignorant one. Which mirrors the public view of the war. Because the information, while not concealed, is not readily available. Less people dying is not a strategy for victory, and permanent occupations are not a cause for celebration.