MSM Mighty Wurlitzer Needle Stuck on Iraq

If you go back that long ago, you will remember your annoyance when the needle on a 45 would keep skipping back a notch and replaying the same groove again and again, until you bumped the victrola or kicked the juke box. The MSM has done a bit of the same trick on Iraq, portraying daily bombings and indiscrimate slaughter without context. Yes, I know that self-exploding maniacs are hard to fit into any context, but yesterday Gen. Casey and Amb. Khalilzad gave a largely-overlooked press conference to explain that the positive aspects of the war are not being explained and context is lacking in the MSM's constant battering of terrible images.

The Al-Jazeera local network stateside, CNN, thought it journalistic to show a propaganda video of US soldiers being in a terrorist sniper's crosshairs. No real US mainstream media commentary on just how inappropriate the rogue CNN network, which considers itnelf "international," was to show inflammatory videos that were meant by insurgents to be propaganda. Imagine the outcry if FOX-News, a much more responsible network, showed the sniper deaths of terrorist insurgents! You get the picture.

The Wall Street Journal attempts to set the record into a different perspective, as the MSM pulls out all the stops on its pipe organ to activate an electorate to vote Democratic.

A measure of rationality at least came yesterday out of Baghdad, where General George Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tried to put the violence in some larger context. The Iraq government is in fact "functioning," as Iraqis continue to get their food rations, and as more than a million civil servants, Iraqi security force members and teachers continue to show up for work every day and get paid. Just this weekend, Iraq's oil minister announced that production had surpassed pre-war levels.

"Economically, I see an Iraq every day that I do not think the American people know about--where cell phones and satellite dishes, once forbidden, are now common, where economic reform takes place on a regular basis, where agricultural production is rising dramatically, and where the overall economy and the consumer sector is growing," said Mr. Khalilzad, who for this attempt at hopeful realism will be derided in some quarters as a Pollyanna.

WSJ's editorial piece goes on to note the obvious:

And while every terrorist success is broadcast far and wide, acts of bravery by Iraqi forces go unheralded. Only 10 days ago, insurgents staged a huge attack on government and police offices in Mosul, but it was successfully repulsed by Iraqi forces. Dozens of insurgents were killed or captured, and one heroic Iraqi police officer gave his life successfully defending others against a suicide truck bomber.

Last night, Bill O'Reilly noted that when he asked David Letterman whether Letterman wanted the US to "win" the war in Iraq, Letterman was silent. As was Rosie O'Donnell when O'Reilly asked her the same question on The View. There is a broad segment of America-haters on the two coasts who simply want the US to lose this war.

WSJ goes on to inject rational discourse into the panic-button MSM responses to the current difficult straits in Iraq.

The truth is that the Sunni insurgents are still capable only of hit-and-run attacks, are slaughtered whenever they gather en masse, and have held down no permanent territory since Fallujah was cleaned out in late 2004. Nor have they been successful in their other goal of keeping their fellow Sunnis out of the political process. Sunnis continue to sit in the current government and parliament, despite being labelled "collaborators" and marked for death.

As General Casey observed yesterday, "we've seen the nature of the conflict evolving from what was an insurgency against us to a struggle for the division of political and economic power among the Iraqis." One of the main challenges now is to reassure the Sunnis that it is safe to compromise with Shiite and Kurdish leaders on issues such as the distribution of oil revenue and the shape of Iraqi federalism. Mr. Maliki must also demobilize--or at least neutralize--the militias that grew in his own Shiite community in response to Sunni violence.

But the political truth is that none of this will happen any sooner if Americans look like they are heading for the exits. Timetables and deadlines may sound like realpolitik, but they only feed suspicions that the U.S. will abandon Iraq's leaders once they have walked out onto a political limb. Iraq is not yet in a state of "civil war," and it has a functioning, if imperfect, government. If changes of tactics or force levels are needed, by all means make them. But what Iraqis most need from Washington is reassurance of support for the tough decisions and battles that lie ahead.

Casey and Khalilzad are right, and the delirious hysterics on the left have always been wrong.

The leftist MSM simply wants the US to lose because its secular-progressive agenda at home will be advanced, in its warped and cynical vision, by a disastrous military misadventure abroad. The Democrats might seize control of Congress and eventually the White House, instead of merely controlling whack-job judiciaries making law by omission and subtraction as the Dems are doing now. They would throw their first-born into the fiery furnaces of Moloch if it will advance their take-over. American honor and credibility should not be cast overboard because frivolous newsies and cloud-cuckoo celebrities want us to lose in Iraq.

It all brings to mind Barry Goldwater's prescient quote some forty years ago, when the now-celebrated Arizona Senator noted: "When treason rules the land, none dare call it treason."