That darned media. It's missing all the good news in Iraq, and is just too easily
manipulated by al Qaeda.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today presented an upbeat report of the conflict in Iraq and said he agrees with the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., that the news media has exaggerated the number of civilian casualties in the conflict....
"We do know, of course, that al-Qaeda has media committees. We do know that they teach people exactly how to try to manipulate the media. They do this regularly. We see the intelligence that reports on their meetings. Now I can't take a string and tie it to a news report and then trace it back to an al-Qaeda media committee meeting. I'm not able to do that at all.
"We do know that their goal is to try to break the will; that they consider the center of gravity of this -- not to be in Iraq, because they know they can't win a battle out there; they consider it to be in Washington, D.C., and in London and in the capitals of the Western world."
Here we go again. We're not losing Iraq because of incompetent leadership, because our troops are understaffed and inadequately equipped, or because we went into the damn thing without any plan for finishing it. We're losing it because the media just isn't believing hard enough that we're winning.
More on the flip.
The core of the matter? Once again it's
counting the dead. The administration continues to insist that the death toll of Iraqi citizens since the bombing of the Askariya shrine is less than 400. Apparently that's the magic number for the administration in denying that what we see now in Iraq is civil war. WaPo has reported much higher death tolls since February 22, the day of the bombing.
The Washington Post reported earlier last week that the death count was higher, quoting Baghdad morgue officials as saying it was more than 1,300 and, subsequently, an Interior Ministry official who put the number at 1,077. An international official knowledgeable about the case also confirmed that the death toll has reached at least 1,000 and said Iraqi officials, including morgue workers, had been intimidated into giving lower numbers.
Why the new offensive against the media? Straight from Rummy's twisted little mouth:
"There's been a public opinion poll reporting that the readers of these exaggerations believe Iraq is in a civil war -- a majority do," Rumsfeld said, adding that faulty news reports had "an effect" on the poll results, swaying the opinion of the American people.
That's right, Rummy. The vast majority of Americans, 80 percent believe that Iraq is headed for civil war. And 52 percent say we should begin withdrawing troops. Two-thirds of those surveyed said that they "do not think the president has a clear plan for handling the Iraq situation, the highest level of doubt recorded since the question was first asked three years ago."
But it's not his fault. It has nothing to do with the fact that he promised before we went into Iraq that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, and that we knew where those weapons are. It's not his fault that he promised we would be greeted as liberators and the war would only last a few months. It's not his fault he, along with Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rice, lied to the American people and now those lies are finally backfiring in public opinion. Of course not, it's the media's fault.