podpolia

You may not have noticed, but the Bush administration seems to be on the offensive in the public opinion aspect of the war in Iraq. Cheney’s speech the other day is only one aspect of this — the Pentagon provided briefing papers giving arguments for the Iraq war to the Senate for their vote the other day. Hopefully this is something that is going to be maintained. One thing the Bush administration has not been good at was keeping up the argument for their policies constantly. Things seem to go in spurts — they wait until something is extremely unpopular, and then attempt to do damage control on it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work very well, and may be one of the reasons that the President’s approval ratings aren’t very good.

As I suggested here, one of the Marines involved in the incident in Haditha is going after those who smeared him — but in this case, he’s going after John Murtha, who insisted that the Marines killed civilians “in cold blood.” They want to know who it was in the Marine Corps that gave Rep. Murtha that particular version of the story. But it gets better: taking a look at the second page of the article, we discover that chances are that even if these Marines are innocent and the Marine Corps would ordinarily clear them, they will now be essentially forced to put them on trial for murder, just to clear the soldiers and the Marine Corps.
It plays out like this: imagine that you are a cop who is awakened one night by a burglar in your home. He has a gun, but you manage to take him by suprise and shoot him yourself. However, in the process, one of the bullets you fire kills one of your neighbors next door. You report the incident to police, they treat it as a cut-and-dried case of self-defense, in which an innocent person was accidentally killed. You go on with your life, although you feel terrible about accidentally killing your neighbor. Several months later, someone in the press starts asking the police about the theory that you killed the burglar, but were so incensed about the crime committed against you that you intentionally shot your neighbor because he was standing in his living room while your house was being burgled.
Naturally, the police want to cover themselves, so they start an investigation. In the mean time, the story gets a lot of attention in the media. The police refuse to comment on an ongoing investigation, so speculation about what “actually happened” runs rampant. The police determined before that there didn’t seem to be any reason to charge you, but they can’t say that to the press, who are now speculating that you knocked on your neighbor’s door and got him out of bed just to shoot him. Of course, the crime scene has been completely changed by now, so the press can’t even examine it for themselves, and instead rely on speculation and rumors. Of course, they want to get more attention, so they make the crime out to be as gruesome as possible. While the police are still investigating, a U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania (who was once a cop himself) makes a statement to the press that according to police sources, you not only shot the burglar to death, but intentionally murdered your neighbor as well, “in cold blood.”
Now to protect themselves from charges of a coverup, the police have to prosecute you. You are now on trial for something that happened 8 months previously, after being branded as a brutal murderer in public by the media and a U.S. Congressman.
It definitely isn’t pretty.
Once again, I must add the caveat that it IS possible that the Marines involved acted improperly in some way. The more of the story that comes out though, the more it looks as though they are merely the victims of libel and slander by a wide variety of groups in our society. The behavior of the press and Rep. Murtha (particularly Rep. Murtha) in this incident have been absolutely reprehensible.

There is finally good news coming out of Iraq, and (suprise, suprise) it’s not originating with the media ‘covering’ the story — instead, it’s coming from captured documents from al-Zarqawi’s headquarters.
This document, for example, tells of the massive success of the training and utilization of Iraqi forces, the successes of the coalition forces, and the desperate situation of the ‘resistance.’ Not only militarily, but financially, diplomatically, and in terms of the media war, the Americans are portrayed as winning. So desperate are the terrorists, that they feel that the only way to win would be to get the US to fight another country (preferably Iran) to reduce American forces and turn the Shi’a against them.
Yet, despite the fact that the terrorists in Iraq are getting desperate, the American media still thinks we’re losing.

More problems are being highlighted with Al Gore’s recent crusade (and movie) about climate change: most scientists he cites aren’t climate change experts. Not only that, but many of the statistics he cites are invalid comparisons, and a number of his conclusions are just plain wrong. Definitely worth reading, if you want to hear the other side of the argument. This counterbalances some of Gore’s hysterics.

RealClearPolitics has an interesting piece about the forced comparison in the media between the incident in Haditha and the My Lai incident during the Vietnam war. Particularly, they take Christopher Hitchens to task for following the usual liberal doctrine that the Viet Cong weren’t really all that bad, just misunderstood. The article essentially makes the point that if there’s anything that fits in the Iraq/Vietnam comparison, it is between Al Qaida in Iraq and the Viet Cong — and both of them are the type of evil that America should be fighting against.

The Iranian government and its Muslim supporters get all upset when America and Europe pressure Iran to follow the Non-Proliferation Treaty and not build nuclear weapons that they would most likely use against one of their neighbors.
However, stuff like this seems not to bother them much.

After weeks of nasty accusations that have more or less gone entirely unanswered, we may finally be getting the soldiers’ side of the story. If I were one of the men involved in this incident and the media said as much nasty stuff about me as they have about these soldiers, I would wait until being cleared by the courts, and then sue all the newspapers that have reported this as an intentional massacre.
I’m not saying that we should unconditionally believe the stories of the Marines in this story — I think the investigation is a good idea — but the media reporting only one side of the story and with such glee at ‘catching’ the Marine Corps as being ‘up to something’ just raises my hackles. If the media were really concerned about objectivity, they would have made more of an effort to get BOTH sides of the story, and present it in a way that wouldn’t attempt to inflame public opinion against the American military.

I must say, this is a new one for me. I can’t say I’ve heard anyone giving that reason for wanting to withdraw the troops from Iraq before.