Mudville Spots a Trend
It’s not the same one assorted media outlets started touting after a bad week in Iraq.
Speaking of assorted media outlets, here’s one that can’t wait for a certain grim milestone:
Analysts say the 4,000 dead, while an arbitrary marker, could inject the war debate back into the campaign season, particularly with the war’s fifth anniversary on Thursday. Or, with overall violence lower in Iraq, the milestone could pass with far less public discussion than in past years.
Well, apparently not if the AP has anything to do with it.
Last year was the deadliest for American troops in Iraq, with 901 troops killed. As of Sunday, at least 3,988 Americans have died in Iraq.
That means, for AP to nail the 5th anniversary/grim milestone target, 12 American soldiers need to die by Thursday.
Here’s a grim milestone the numbers-obsessed agency missed.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:07 pm on Sunday, March 16, 2008
3 Responses to “Mudville Spots a Trend”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Actually, they’re both right. Reuters’ bureau is simply echoing what commanders actually are saying. Why are they saying this? Because they don’t know if the trends for attacks and fatalities (recently edging up) will head back down, or escalate.
They don’t want to be on record as saying that everything is rosy, puppy dogs and lollipops, and then (for example) the remnants of the so-called “Mahdi Army” (JAM) revolt in East Baghdad.
These commanders are taking their cue from CMNF-I himself. It’s in counter-point to the former CMNF-I, our current CSA, who seemed to tell reporters that everything was getting better, all the time, while secretly yapping to his bosses that we should pull out, that victory was impossible, and that it was a more prudent tactical pursuit to send mounted vehicular patrols onto the MSRs to get blown up than actually protect the population and their traditional leaders from murder by foreign salafist fighters and their allied insurgent nutjobs.
So, that’s the dynamic, Jules. I don’t blame the military commanders for mouthing the company line, the reporters for reporting their words or the milbloggers for noticing a trend both the reporters and the commanders spotted a long time ago.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I understand the military politics of the situation. AP & Reuters is another story. They are not political organizations, at least, they pretend not to be. If the trend of violence is down they should be reporting it. Of course, that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, so instead it is mostly ignored, until they have some bad news to report that makes things look like they are getting worse.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Actually, the trend last month was up for civilian casualties. Not so “up” that it reaches even close to the June 2007 numbers, but still slightly up. The various wire services have reported this as a “spike,” which is to suggest that it’s a deviation from a “trend” downward.
Part of this is seasonal (the warmer and drier it gets in Iraq, the more casualties encountered), but there are other forces at play.
Is that the “preferred narrative” one perfers? I’m not sure. I think both AP and Reuters have accurately shown in numerous stories that trends in violence (both manifested against US-led Coalition troops/organic Iraqi security forces and civilians) are down since the so-called “Surge” began.
BBC and other major media reported the latest poll in Iraq that shows increasingly happier peoples, but the message can be mixed:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7300115.stm
The reality is that while civil society slowly returns to the Baghdad AO (just as it slowly did in Ramadi and East Anbar), no trendline can predict if this shall be a permanent phenomenon. Commanders, cautious by their natures and noting the uptick in violent assaults (a suicide bomber seems to have killed or wounded more than 80 people in Karbala today), don’t want to do what GEN Casey’s command did: Present a rosy scenario that will implode with the return of sectarian fighting.
Would a female suicide bomber detonating her explosives at the foot of one of Shi’i Islam’s most holiest shrines do that? A group of bombers intent on destroying a similar mosque in Samarra sure did.
Fluid, my friends. War is very fluid.