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N.Y. Times Wrong Again on Iraq
The New York Times just can’t get it right. Correction: The Times just doesn’t want to get it right. Note: I just issued a correction–something the NYT never does in any meaningful way.
The latest attack from the worst paper in America begins as follows: “With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.”
For starters the “increase” is not four months old. We just got the last of the boots on the ground last week. The build-up began four months ago.
Fred Kagan has much more to say about the inaccuracies in the article over at The Weekly Standard:
1. This article notes that suicide bombings have dropped in Baghdad (and risen elsewhere) as evidence of the failure of the effort. We must remember that it is called the Baghdad Security Plan, not the Iraq Security Plan. If bombings are dropping in Baghdad, which the administration, General Petraeus, and everyone else who supported this proposal identified as the center of gravity–as the capital is home to roughly a quarter of Iraq’s population–then the Baghdad Security Plan is working. No one imagined or promised that 30,000 troops would get the whole country under control in four months.
2. No one imagined or promised that the plan would work even in Baghdad in just four months. Saying that the plan has “failed so far to fulfill the aim of bringing enhanced stability to Baghdad” is both inappropriate and wrong. It is inappropriate because the plan is just starting to take full effect. It is wrong because both sectarian killings and, apparently from this article, suicide bombings are down in Baghdad. How is that failing to bring “enhanced stability” to the capital?
3. Burns and Rubin say, “An initial decline in sectarian killings in Baghdad in the first two months of the troop buildup has reversed, with growing numbers of bodies showing up each day in the capital.” Actually, killings were down for the first four months of the buildup, not two. More bodies were found in the first two weeks of May, although a number were found in neighborhoods we had not been in and which were in advanced states of decay. General Petraeus noted recently that killings in the third week of May were back down. The rise in killings has brought the level back to one-half of what it had been before the surge (up from one-third). And we must remember that the figures were climbing steadily month-to-month at the end of 2006. It would have been an accomplishment to hold them steady; it is a major accomplishment to be keeping them at the current level.
Reading between the lies, I mean lines, of the NYT story you can discern that the Baghdad Security Plan, i.e., The Surge, is working.
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