BULLWINKLE: Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.
ROCKY: Again?
BULLWINKLE: Nothin’ up my sleeve. (riiiiiiiip!) Presto!
LION: ROAR!
ROCKY: Wrong hat.
BULLWINKLE: I take a size 7 1/2.
Bullwinkle tried that trick about 10 times but was never able to master it. He pulled everything but a rabbit out of that hat, proving if nothing else that he was bound and determined to make that rabbit appear despite being wrong so often in the past.
For some reason, Bullwinkle’s efforts in this regard reminded me of media coverage over the last 3 years of the Iraq Civil War.
What’s that you say? You mean to tell me that there hasn’t been an Iraq Civil War? You’d never know it by reading what the “experts” have been saying over the past several years, including our own State Department, the CIA, and all of those wise and prescient “analysts” so beloved by the media.
Here’s a random listing of articles from “experts” telling us that the Iraq Civil War was imminent or that it had already started.
“Iraq’s Civil War” Slate (5/2-03)
Beirut Redux The New Republic (5/15/03)
“CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush’s Optimism” Common Dreams, (1/22/04)
“Civil War in Iraq?” Anti-War.Com (7/22/04)
“Possibility of Iraq civil war looms large” China Daily (9/22/04)
“Iraq Edges Toward Civil War” United Press (12/28/04)
“Seymour Hersh: Iraq “Moving Towards Open Civil War” Democracy Now (5/11/05)
“Allawi: This is the Start of Civil War” Times Online (7/10/2005)
“Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war” Times Online (7/18-05)
“Undeclared Civil War in Iraq” CBS News (9/26/05)
Iraq Edges (What, again? ed.) Toward Civil War Al Jazeera (10/4/05)
Iraq: Game Over Tom Paine (12/22/05)
It would be hilarious if the subject matter weren’t so serious.
If there’s one thing that the press has yet to realize (and even bloggers who should know better) is that just about every word they’ve ever written can be retrieved with a click of a mouse button. So when we can easily see how many times they’ve cried “wolf!” in the past with regards to an Iraqi civil war, we can begin to examine events in that bloody, tragic country as they really are and not through the prism of bias and stupidity.
Iraq is in trouble. No one with half a brain denies that. The fact that Iraq has been in trouble since the statue of Saddam fell escaped many observers including most of the civilian Pollyannas in the Department of Defense and even some Rebeccas of Sunnybrook Farms in the White House. The forces at work spreading chaos, blood, and sectarian divisions have at times been underestimated and downplayed. This miscalculation has cost both Iraqi and American lives and contributed in no small way to the current state of affairs Iraq finds itself.
The war in Iraq is now not between America on one side and homegrown insurgents and their allies in al Qaeda on the other. The war is between Nihilism and Order. It is between hope and despair. It is between the past and the future. And most assuredly, it is between democracy and tyranny.
We might not particularly like the kind of democracy that Iraq is moving toward. It doesn’t look much like ours and it incorporates some elements of religion that most Americans would find unacceptable. Be that as it may, democracy is not an event, it is a process (HT: Reynolds). And the process, despite the bombings, the murders, the beheadings, the blowing up of mosques, and all the other furies of war that have been unleashed on that benighted country, is moving forward.
It may be moving two steps ahead and one back at a time. And in the end, time itself may work to destroy the fragile hopes and dreams of a people who have suffered through a conflict that features actors who have more at stake than what happens in one tiny corner of Mesopotamia. Make no mistake; both the United States and al Qaeda, as well as most of the other countries in the region, are fighting this war for goals that reach far beyond the sandy expanse of Iraq. This is a war for the future and what shape it will take. In that respect, every nation in the world is affected by what’s happening in Iraq.
It’s always easier to spread chaos than instill order in societies that wish to be free. For that reason, we’ll always be at a disadvantage against our enemies in Iraq. But maybe, just maybe, there is just enough hope in the future among just enough people in Iraq that in the end, it is they who will be able to will a new Iraq into existence. Consider:
- Every single politician of note from all sects and all regions of the country have called for an end to the violence.
- Every prominent religious leader (including the problematic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) have appealed for calm.
- In the mixed neighborhoods where Shias and Sunnis live side by side, there has been cooperation in protecting each others lives and property. Many Sunni mosques are being guarded by Shias and vice versa.
- Both Sunnis and Shias have begun rebuilding the Shrine in Samarra. This began less than 12 hours after the bombing.
- The same Powerline reader who passed along the rebuilding news, points out that it appears the bombings have had the opposite effect; it has brought Shias and Sunnis together in a unity that was not there before the destruction of the Shrine.
In short, the forces at work to keep a civil war from happening are strong. Are they strong enough?
Only time and circumstance will reveal the answer to that question. But I’m sure of one thing; the people who have so confidently been predicting civil war in Iraq for 3 years haven’t been right yet. Why believe them now?
1:14 pm
*
Rick Moran notes that it’s not the first time the so-called experts have predicted Iraq was on the brink of …
3:15 pm
Democracy is not a pretty sight at the best of times, even in the most developed countries (assuming America meets that definition).
Democratic elections are a series of zig-zags along the path towards an ideal.
I think that it thus stands to reason that the first election that a country has little or no meaning. It is not until the fourth or fifth election that a clear direction starts to appear.
I would expect it to be, therefore, perhaps 20 years before the Iraqi government begins to sort itself out.
The fact that there are THREE factions in Iraq is a problem that may contain the roots of its own solution. None of the three has quite enough power to do without one of the other two.
This will, ultimately, force compromise.
Note that our own country required a civil war to achieve its final form.
5:56 pm
Or one could just as easily say that, if in fact civil war breaks out, they were right all along. Certainly one cannot say that events are leading us to believe that they are more probably wrong than right.
6:02 pm
Um…no, we couldn’t “easily say” that someone who predicted an Iraq civil war 2 freakin’ years ago was right “all along.”
In fact, we could much more easily say they were full of crap.
This may yet become a civil war. More likely the violence will peter out, the Sunnis will come back to the table…until the next well placed bomb brings the country to the brink again.
To recognize this kind of instability without going off half cocked and saying that “this is it” as far as the catalyst for a civil war is much more realistic.
6:43 pm
the msm has repeatedly got these stories wrong, too:
believe it or not, the guardian recently opined that communism was really not that bad;
not a single msm outlet has ever recanted the “massacre in jeningrad story”, or that mohummed al dura was NOT a victim of colonialism but of ruthless jihadoterror (the fallows Atlantic article is as big as it got);
the MSM continuously harps that retributionary and preventive/preemptive violence – (like the Mossad’s response to Munich, the USA’s response to a decade of Saddam’s violating the armistice,) – only adds to the “cycle of violence;” constant use of body-counts/”death total updates” are used to highlight this angle – as if as long as there are deaths due to jihadoterror we haven’t won and/or we aren’t making any progress;
and they continue to deny that lebanon and libya were reformed – and syria forced to exit lebanon – by bush’s aggressive foreign policies.
if the MSM during WW2 had been this bad, then FDR’s would’ve essentially had to get his message out through what amounts to Goebbels’ propaganda machine. and he wouldn’t have been reelected in 1944.
YUP: the MSM today works as much for the enemy as the Goebbels machine worked for Hitler, and as Pravda worked for the USSR.
Today’s MSM are – for all intents and purposes – a tool of the enemy.
12:27 pm
For the most part, the same people who have warned incessantly about civil war are the same ones who told us that tens of thousands of Americans would die in the initial ground assault, that there were be be a cataclysmic “battle of Baghdad” that would tie up our forces for months, that there would be a humanitarian disaster marked by mass starvation, and who always tell us that the elections won’t go off as planned.
Not to say that the situation in Iraq, especially in the Sunni triangle, isn’t bad. It is. But there is no civil war and probably won’t be one.
Rather, as Lee Harris said over at Winds of Change Iraq is on the brink of “tribalist anarchy”. I’m now thinking that this is a better term to describe the danger than “civil war”, which implies something along the American experience 1860-5 or the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
2:57 pm
Sunday Funnies
Rest In Peace to Don Knotts. This list of funnies are in honor to all the times he made us laugh.
image courtesy of Parley Hellewell
Conservathink has the Carnival of Comedy
Sex Pistols spit on Hall of Fame honor
Suitably Flip gives us Arnold Mee…
4:25 pm
It is interesting to note how ready MSM is to declare the beginning of the “Iraqi Civil War” but how reluctant they are then to report that it has not started—yet.
12:37 am
In a real war, the enemy will seek out your weak points to attack. The U.S. weak point has been the willingness of political opponents to scream for surrender whenever something bad happens, either to us or to the enemy. Tactics change to fit the situation, which is which is why no war can be won with some grand, unbeatable plan.
7:35 am
[...] VINCE AUT MORIRE VODKAPUNDIT WALLO WORLD WHAT ATTITUDE PROBLEM? WIDE AWAKES WIZBANG WUZZADEM AMERICAN MSM DUPED BY AL QAEDA REPORTS OF IRAQ CIVIL WAR? ABOUT THAT SLIPPERY SLOPE… ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (AND OTHER IDIOCIES)IRAQ: THE BULLWINKLE FACTOR HAMAS SIGNS CONTRACT TO RUN AMTRAK IRAQ CRISIS: FORT SUMTER OR BLEEDING KANSAS? THE COUNCIL HAS SPOKEN CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS #33: THE KISS AND MAKE-UP EDITION BACKLASH AGAINST THE BACKLASH MAKE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY A NATIONAL HOLIDAY AGAIN ANY PORT IN A STORM…EXCEPT THIS ONE MARTHA FOR PRESIDENT! ELBARADEI: HEART OF MUSH, HEAD OF STONE WHAT’S A HYPERPOWER TO DO? THE LEFT HASN’T LEARNED A DAMNED THING FROM 9/11 THE HOUSE TAKES A HOLIDAY THE “HAPPY WARRIOR” IS WEEPING IN HIS GRAVE THE COUNCIL HAS SPOKEN SADDAM TAPES: WHY IT’S ALWAYS GOOD TO LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP DISAPPEARING HOUSE II REPUBLICAN DIVERSITY ENCOMPASSES BUSH CRITICS CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS CANCELED: WORLD COMES TO AN END “SADDAM TAPES” REQUIRE A CAUTIOUS APPROACH DISAPPEARING HOUSE SOLIDARITY FOREVER “24″ (45) ABLE DANGER (10) Bird Flu (5) Blogging (69) Books (5) CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS (57) CHICAGO BEARS (9) CIA VS. THE WHITE HOUSE (6) Cindy Sheehan (10) Ethics (44) General (262) Government (27) History (49) Iran (12) KATRINA (24) Katrina Timeline (4) Marvin Moonbat (14) Media (62) Middle East (24) Moonbats (40) Open House (1) Politics (141) Science (12) Space (11) Supreme Court (18) War on Terror (89) WATCHER’S COUNCIL (36) WORLD POLITICS (34) WORLD SERIES (14) Admin Login Register Valid XHTML XFN [...]
6:24 am
[...] According to the left, Iraq has been “sliding into civil war” or there has been a “de facto” civil war” in Iraq at least 7 different times since Saddam’s statue fell. Of course, they were laughably wrong. Just as their warnings about imminent disaster in Iraq over the last three years were wrong as well. Their reading of what was actually happening in that country was so consistently off target that any accuracy that can be ascribed to their analysis to today’s Iraq might be placed in the realm of blind luck. Keep repeating the same Cassandra-like warnings of disaster over and over and over and eventually when the explosion happens, you can pretend that you weren’t so unalterably wrong for three years running. [...]