Podhoretz on Defeaticrat Panic:We are Winning!

Commentary: Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that they "shrink from the service of [their] country."

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . . [T]heir peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-7 and the American panic of 2005-6. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: in that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq?which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces, cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between each of them and the Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news: it occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than 8 million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these 8 million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi Man in the Street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79 percent of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it:

was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a September 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths."

In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.

About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did a little tally of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be January 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration?s Iraq policy.
1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.
887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.
216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.
761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.
357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.
182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.
217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).
107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.
123 stories noting Vice President Cheney?s admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.
118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.
121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.
27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.
As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:
16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.
7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.
73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.1

Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq. Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists, and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the President and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

That's just an excerpt. It's a long piece, but there's plenty more good stuff, so read the whole thing here. Thanks to Old Soldier for pointing me to it.