ya gotta admit that it is not as bad, so far, as you thought it was going to be.
It’s much worse than I thought it would be. I expected, and predicted, a “honeymoon” period, with a fairly quick restoration of basic services and public order. I’d have to say I erred on the side of optimism there.
I still think terrorism will become a problem, once soft targets begin to accumulate. Our presence there is still overwhelmingly military, and security is tight. Once we get large numbers of American civilian workers there, it will be impossible to maintain that level of security, and the problems will start. I think it’s already going to be difficult for the companies that want to participate to find people willing to take the risks, after recent events in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
If there’s anything positive happening on the political side, it’s well hidden.
It would, as I’ve said elsewhere, be a huge mistake to assume that the Shiite leaders are politically naïve, or that they are incapable of making temporary alliances with each other, or with Sunni groups that are Islamist or simply anti-American. They probably have a much better handle on Iraqi political realities than any of the American administrators or recently returned exile leaders. It would not be wise to underestimate them.
recognize that the country is not in as bad a shape as the Western press, ensconced in Bagdad Hotels, applying Western standards, and fed info by their former Baath "Minders," tells us it is.
Shooting the messenger, are we? Any particular grounds for those assumptions?
I seriously doubt that too many reporters are hanging out in the hotels. News is a fiercely competitive business, and reporters fight like hell to get those overseas posts. They’ll do anything to get a story that the others haven’t got, or to undercut somebody else’s story. That’s not a question of ideology, it’s a question of personal advancement.
In any event, there are plenty of conservative media around, so if there is good news we aren’t getting from one source, we should be getting it from other sources. Have you seen any? I don’t mean stories of little girls giving flowers to soldiers, I mean evidence of meaningful progress in physical reconstruction, or political organization, or finding WMD.
Obviously no one source of news, good or bad, has the whole picture, and any source that seems too rosy or too black is suspect. Overall, though, I can’t say the picture looks terribly good, and I don’t buy the notion that it’s all because of a liberal media conspiracy. |
