The Opinionated Bastard

So with all the doom and gloom on the news, I was looking forward to the Brookings report to see what was really going on.

In February, US soldiers killed in action or wounded has gone down for the 4th straight month in a row (all graphs popup):

Technorati Tags: Brookings, Iraq

Bad News:

My previous post relied on the Brookings Iraq Index, which itself relied on the body count numbers from Iraq Body Count. Turns out though that IBC hasn't included any civilian deaths since Feb 22, the date of the shrine bombing. So the numbers I have for civilians are way off. They probably won't be updated for awhile, the Iraqis can't actually agree how many people died either, some say 300, some say 1300. (Note that Iraq Body Count already reports a high-low number.)

Usually these sorts of numbers are way off. 10,000,7,000, 5,000, 3,000, 2,823 people died on 9/11.

100,000, 50,000, 10,000, 5,000, 1,104 died as a result of Hurricane Katrina

So who knows what the truth will be. For that matter, Saddam couldn't be bothered to have a census, so even the past numbers on IBC which tries to be fairly conservative could be off since they're relying on press reports.

Good News:

Another blogger caught it: Liberalism without Cynicism

I said it before, but I started blogging because I subscribed to the State Department's daily briefing post 9/11 and I was shocked. The media can't even transcribe what the administration says accurately...we might be better off with stenographers then “journalists”. Someone better warn Linda that if she starts fact checking the media, she may become a Bush supporter. That's what happened to me...

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Terrorism

From a journalist no less

In place of the civil war that elements in our media declared, I saw full streets, open shops, traffic jams, donkey carts, Muslim holiday flags - and children everywhere, waving as our Humvees passed. Even the clouds of dust we stirred up didn't deter them. And the presence of children in the streets is the best possible indicator of a low threat level.

A few days ago, a wild claim that the Baghdad morgue held 1,300 bodies was treated as Gospel truth. Yet Iraqis exaggerate madly and often have partisan interests. Did any Western reporter go to that morgue and count the bodies - a rough count would have done it - before telling the world the news?

Read the whole thing.

Instapundit is right if we lose this war, I will blame the media. I started blogging because after I subscribed to the State Department email of the daily news briefing, and I compared it to what was broadcast, I realized:

The press aren't even good stenographers. Anything they say the administration said, may not even be true.

Looks like Mudville Gazette found the same thing.

Look, I understand how journalism works. I write for a local monthly paper. I realize that if every day the masthead said “Today, pretty much like Yesterday”, no one would shell out $0.50 for a paper.

But even the lefty art rag I write for interviewed a soldier who served in Iraq this month, and they got it right. Why can't the big guys?

Not for themselves mind you. The movie industry is doomed: I had to watch a 3:40 commercial for them, and none of it was about how their movies might be say, fun to watch. No, they were good for you.

Bite me, movie industry. Even Jon Stewart had to make fun, connecting the number of movies about “important stuff”, to well, the fact that no one went to the movies in 2005...because they all SUCKED!

And what was all that stuff ragging on how the big screen was “better” then DVD? Oh yeah? When I watch a movie on DVD, beer and wine are served.

If I want to be preached at, I'll go to church.

Anyways, the Oscars were fun for me this time because I played “Oscar Bingo” with my wife. Seems the Mars company of M&M fame had this cool little PDF you could download.

Hey, those rapper dudes are wearing sunglasses! BINGO!

So if you TiVo'ed it, you might want to download the cards.

Jan in the comments on this piece asks:

Will Sunnis and Shiites go to war? from an Arabic newspaper.

None of that breathless anticipation “Let's have a war!” that you see in the Western media.

Over at The Real Ugly American

A Citizen of Mosul is a teenage Iraqi girl who writes today and yesterday about her uncle getting shot by US troops.

I've been reading her blog for awhile. She was a sunny, optimistic girl, and she was generally willing to give the US troops the benefit of the doubt.

Today she writes:

Or just because a scared boy holding a gun hiding behind his Stryker and protected from the law, this what changed him from a human to a monster.

GO HOME AMERICANS, WE DON'T WANT YOU HERE

It's very discouraging to read this today, because for a long time now I've been following her blog. Even though she lived in one of the most dangerous places in Iraq, even though her house got searched (and she wrote about how humiliating it was), she was willing to see our point of view.

Shooting her uncle was obviously a mistake. It's turned a potential ally into an enemy. Why it happened, we'll probably never know.

Of course, things like this are inevitable in war. In fact, if the MSM didn't have their head up their butt, they'd actually be covering more of this stuff. (They're actually incompetent in both directions.) If they were fair, they'd also cover not only when US troops shot the wrong guys, but when the insurgents deliberately killed people. In fact, I'd love to see a score card:

Iraqis accidentally killed by US Troops: 500 Iraqis deliberately killed by insurgents: 10,000

I think the media bias is bad because the way I see it, if the media is always going to portray the soldiers in the worst possible light, there is no reason for them to try harder to act well.

Similarly, if they always portray the insurgents in the best possible light, there is no reason for them to act well either.

According to Osama Bin Laden, he considered America a paper tiger because we're unwilling to accept both our own casualties nor that of our enemies. There's some truth to that. Osama doesn't care how many Iraqis he kills, even if we do.

The ideal for me would be for both sides to have every action scrutinized in immense detail, to see something like the scorecard above. What we're trying to do in Iraq is hard, and we have to do it with imperfect people. The reality of an occupation is that an accidental shooting by an Iraqi policeman is a tragedy; an accidental shooting by a US soldier is a call to jihad.

But the media aren't making it any easier. The media could very easily break the cycle of violence in Iraq where: insurgents attack soldiers; soldiers fight back; innocents get killed; insurgents recruit from the families. If they just portrayed the true viciousness of the insurgents, if they reported the ideals that led us into Iraq as well as the baser motivations, I wouldn't have to worry about a civil war in Iraq this morning.

Nor would I have to worry about our soldiers degenerating into barbarians themselves. They say you always turn into your enemy...

sigh Time to send another care package to Iraq I think...

Jon may not agree, but I think good actions have ripples. I think bad actions have ripples to. I've seen that happen in my own life, and the life of others.

Sometimes its obvious how bad actions cause other bad actions, sometimes its not.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my view of the war. Two choices which suck. Anyways, Michael Totten is in Iraqi, and interviews the caretaker of a Shia shrine here

My last update missed an important point, which a commenter pointed out: Iraq Body Count hadn't updated their civilian deaths since the shrine bombing when I did my monthly analysis of the Brookings Iraq Index report.

Unlike the media, I like it when people fact check me. It means I learn something.

I had to wait for an update to the Brookings report, so I have new numbers for the civilian deaths in February, some new graphs about troop levels, and a new conclusion.