Surge Working Better Than Couric Will Admit?

There is no greater joy for someone who cares about Iraq than to watch Al Qaeda and these other jihadist groups go at each other with the bloodthirsty abandon and frenzy that only crazed zealots can muster. The bloodletting has gone far beyond the point of any possible reconciliation, for Al Qaeda must destroy all the others in order to survive, and ditto for the others as they face down Al Qaeda. It has turned into an all-or-nothing fight among the most dangerous insurgents, and it is heartening to see them engaged and distracted in destroying each other...Now if only the American press would report on this jihadist meltdown so that policymakers in Washington can rally the martial spirit to bring this battle to a crushing end for the enemy....Jihadist Meltdown, Nibras Kazimi, The New York Sun, 3/12/2007

Reading this astonishing story about the disintegration of the jihadist insurrection in Iraq, a civil war between terrorists (much like the one going on between Palestinen factions) made the writer try to imagine what Speaker Pelosi bases her policy directions on. Let's see. She opens The San Francisco Chronicle and reads that 97 Shi'ites were killed. On its editorial page, the editor, an old friend, writes that it's time to acknowledge defeat. To confirm this, Speaker Pelosi watches CBS Evening News, joining the four or five other people who enjoy the program. Katie Couric confirms the Chronicle stories and its editor's point of view. So, Speaker Pelosi, the story "confirmed" by "different" media sources, adding perhaps a call or two to Representative Murtha and Al Franken, decides to write legislation to more or less surrender in the War on Terror. If The Chronicle published stories like the one by Nibras Kazimi, a Hudson Institute scholar whose background includes fluency in Arabic, a rarity among American intelligence operatives in Iraq, would she offer a different law? If Katie Couric's Iraq reports were shot by crews and reported by journalists unassociated with the DNC, would Speaker Pelosi watch ABC instead?

But it's not only the anti-war crowd in the press that doesn't want the American people to know that America's soldiers are fighting an Al Qaeda-led insurgency in Iraq. The Central Intelligence Agency and most of America's intelligence community don't want to do that either, according to a major scoop reported by the Sun's own Eli Lake on Monday. Mr. Lake writes that the CIA and others are still concluding that the insurgency is, for the most part, Baathist in nature, while those actually battling the insurgency on the ground, namely the intelligence arms of the Army and the Marines, are contesting that assertion claiming instead that the Sunni insurgency is largely driven by Al Qaeda...The generic term "insurgent" — preferred by most press organs — is bland and insipid, while the term Al Qaeda may strike an emotional note with many Americans. It is one thing for congressional Democrats and presidential hopefuls to pledge withdrawing the American military from a melee with insurgents, and a whole different thing for them to sound a retreat in the face of an Al Qaeda offensive...Blackout of the Press, by Nibras Kazimi, The Hudson Institute online, 2/8/2007

Draw your own conclusions.

Luther