Once again, we’re dealing with the issue of conditions in Iraq, which those who oppose the war (most of whom opposed the war from the beginning and are proud to have done so) saying things like the comment left by John Quiggin in the post on News, Good, Bad, and Fake:
Interesting. On the one hand, the point that the general situation in Iraq is so terrible as to make disputes over minor points in a single story irrelevant is dismissed with “fake but accurate”.
On the other hand, the point that this is a huge waste of effort if all you are concerned with is minor points a single news item is rejected because such items are indicative of a pervasive MSM bias.
I addressed exactly the same point last year, and don;t think I can improve on my argument. Rather than linking back to it, I thought I’d reproduce the post and see what kind of discussion we can kick off.
From December, 2006:
Jamail Hussein and Karen Toshima
In the thread to my first Jamail Hussein post below, commenter Andrew Lazarus says:
A.L., you seem to be seizing on this fire incident as an indication that the MSM coverage of Iraq is way off. But at the same time, neither you nor anyone else is suggesting that the counts of maimed corpses, or dead soldiers, or explosions is in any way exaggerated. The impression of Iraq as some sort of hell on earth really doesn’t depend on this one gruesome story…any more than our perception of the Holocaust depends on the discredited story of Jews turned into soap.
I happen to think that this particular story – and the other stories – coming out of Iraq matter a lot because our policies on the war will be driven by our perceptions which are in turn driven by – the stories we read.My reply to Andrew started this way (with some amendations):
The problem, Andrew, is [we don’t know] whether [Iraq is] hell on earth or heck (or Beaumont, Texas); that’s the point I keep trying to raise and that keeps getting slapped aside.
I spoke with Greg Sergeant today about all this, and we had a friendly chat in which I tried to explain why it is that one reported tragedy like this matters so much (and why the aggregation of small tragedies matters so much) and I asked if he’d ever heard of Karen Toshima.
He hadn’t so let me explain here.
I did a fast experiment – someone with Lexis-Nexis could do better – and searched the LA Times website archive (which has stories searchable since 1/1/1985) and looked for some word combinations…
Mentions of ‘gang murder’ in the L.A. Times in 1987: 297
Mentions of ‘gang killing’ in the L.A. Times in 1987: 192
Mentions of ‘gang murder’ in the L.A. Times in 1989: 649
Mentions of ‘gang killing’ in the L.A. Times in 1989: 435
Annual increase (both terms summed) from 1987 to 1989: 60.8%
Mentions of ‘murder’ in 1987: 3,893
Mentions of ‘killing’ in 1987: 3,585
Mentions of ‘murder’ in 1989: 5,686
Mentions of ‘killing’ in 1989: 5,117
Annual increase (terms summed): 22.2%
The underlying numbers look like this:
Overall Homicides in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County in 1987: 975
Overall Homicides in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County in 1989: 1,053
Annual Increase: 4.0%
Gang Homicides in Los Angeles County in 1987: 387
Gang Homicides in Los Angeles County in 1989: 554
Annual Increase: 21.5%
Note that the increase in gang homicides – 167 – is greater than the increase in the number of total homicides – 78. This suggests the possibility that some homicides that would otherwise have been classified as ‘normal’ were instead classified as ‘gang’ – something I’ll take up with my law-enforcement friends.
What changed? Why did the coverage go up so much more than the underlying numbers?
Karen Toshima was murdered, that’s what changed.
In 1988 in Westwood Village, then the ‘Third Street’ of Los Angeles, where young upper middle class people went to dine and catch a movie or listen to some music or dance, two gangs opened fire on each other and Long Beach resident Karen Toshima died.
Suddenly in the consciousness of the upper-middle-class of Los Angeles – the class that produces TV news and newspaper columns – gang murders, which had been confined to streetcorners and alleys in South Central and East Los Angeles were vividly real.
And if you lived in Los Angeles then, you locked your doors and bought guns. I must have taken half a dozen friends to the shooting range and then the gun store that year.
For most of the next decade, as gang crime rose, peaked in 1995, and then fell dramatically, the narrative of life in Los Angeles was the omnipresent fear of gang violence.
That fear was fed by sensational media – first news, then movies and television – and it defined and limited life in Los Angeles.
Was gang violence a real issue in Los Angeles before 1988? Of course. Was it something worth spending significant resources on and attempting to suppress? Yes.
But the monomaniacal focus on Los Angeles as the “Gang Capital of the World” created a false impression that Crips and Bloods ruled the streets. Where did that perception come from? From reporting the, like a hip-hop drumbeat, regularly pounded home the point
In a few small pockets, for a few years, yes. But the vast majority of people in Los Angeles – people like me – drove throughout the city, ate in restaurants throughout the city (three of my favorites are in South Central and two in East LA).
But the perception of the city changed. Policies changed as a result – policies that may or may not have been good ones.
In Iraq the stakes are much higher. But the mechanisms we’re using to sort them out really are no different. Wouldn’t it be nice if they were?
Ok, I see your point. We should trust the statistics that describe reality on the ground rather than “flood the zone” reporting designed to attract upper-middle class readers.
Unfortunately, the actual statistics trend against your view.
Good link Talbioto.
Actually though, it’s a bit worse than that.
A.L.’s saying, to use his terms, that the news can create ‘false impressions’, and I’m assuming then, that the strategy behind these posting obsessions about the “exact” facts of Jamil Hussein, Beauchamp, etc – is to “combat” the false impressions by…creating different, but even more false impressions!
Talbioto, you have the right idea – use facts to counteract “impressions”.
In this case, A.L. is aligning with those who are desperate to hear only the good news. And when negative facts hit them, the occupations supporters will not report it, or, they give a rah-rah treatment, or a “stay the course” speech.
And then OTHER “false impressions” – such as those created by a Bush admin flack HOLDING BACK a Surgeon General’s report, for political reasons, or those who politicize Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc, by falsely reporting what happened to them initially, and using them as “political wins”, where’s the obsessive posting and reposting to “make sure” the facts are right then?
It’s gone. No longer operative. It would be nice to see the same disgust against those who politicized Tillman, and repeated insistent posts to get the facts right to do honor to this soldier.
Let’s get these internet sleuths on that story, harassing the generals or admin flacks responsible.
talboito –
Matthew Yglesias says he stole that chart from Brian Beutler. He shouldn’t feel guilty – Beutler stole it from the Brookings Institute, and without attribution. He’s a bad boy. “Here is the source of the graph (.pdf file).”:http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf
Now if we evaluated these things the way the leftheads do, we’d immediately disregard this information (with a great show of indignant contempt) because the Brookings Institution – excuse me, Institute – is a well-known crash pad for unemployable Liberals who believe in having sex with circus animals, and who can’t count past ten without washing one of their feet. But we pursue a higher intellectual road here, and we will not discount them out of hand.
Having the benefit of the original source allows us to follow the footnote and see where these statistics came from. This turns out to be a surprising array of sources – the first of which is an AP story! But never mind that. For the purposes of this discussion, we will assume that the AP is a regular burning bush of truthfulness, and we will ignore the circular logic of defending media reports based on statistics derived from media reports.
Having thus beaten our prejudices into submission, we can now read the report. Note that there are quite of number of graphs, and Mr. Beutler had to go on quite a cherry-picking holiday to find a really scary one. Even if he was only trying to scare Matthew Yglesias. He did not choose one that shows the recent decline in casualties and civilian deaths, for obvious reasons. Nor did he pick the one that says only 25% of Iraqi Shi’ites believe that Iraq is in a Civil War, because that’s not very scary. It just doesn’t have “impending doom” written all over it.
So he worked hard to get the best-worst graph, though he ignored the others that go a long way toward explaining it, such as the graphs that show greatly increased patrols and the huge increase in Combat Outposts and Joint Security Stations, meaning greater contact with the enemy – which is kind of what the surge is all about.
I’ll give him a B+ for cherry-picking, a C for scaring other liberals (too easy), and an F for pretending that the Wall Street Journal would misrepresent data when that’s exactly what he’s doing.
hypocrisy —
So political appointees hold back reports who’s political statements they don’t agree with? Why next you’ll tell me that the President, be it Bill or George, gets to run the Executive Branch and not the permanent bureaucracy and it’s enablers in Congress. Heavens.
It was of course LIBERALS who made a hero out of Lynch, desperate to justify women in the military much less combat positions. Let’s be honest, what happened to Lynch including her awful assaults by her Iraqi captors are Exhibit A why women have no place in the military whatsoever.
Nor did the Army brass “make a hero out of Tillman,” rather they covered up the ineptitude of senior Army generals who ordered over the unit commanders objections a risky split up of the unit and move to meet some stupid “boots on the ground” objective before nightfall. Pat Tillman (and the Afghan Interpreter) died and the Company Commander and others were seriously wounded by friendly fire so some General could say he made his objective by moving the unit to a spot on the map by nightfall. [Pat Tillman of course like all other soldiers who sacrifice so much was a hero merely for enlisting.]
As for Iraq we have so far the belief of Petraeus the commander that he is making progress. The MNF-I gives daily briefings on operations conducted and various statistics. Operations are up while casualties are down.
However, we do not know:
*Strength of Al Qaeda in Iraq forces, how many they kill.
*Strength of Iran’s Qods Force in Iraq, how many they kill directly or indirectly.
*Strength of the Shia Militia, how many they kill.
*Number of Saddam’s criminals he let loose still at large, their victim’s tallies.
And a great many other things. Are things getting better? Can Iran or Al Qaeda simply flood Iraq with their men to cause a wave of killing? Outwait the US? Will withdrawal simply make all sides harden their positions and make no concessions in preparation for the civil war to the death sure to follow a US retreat?
Glenn, thank you for the link.
Your criticism was clueless, though. This graph was based on data from the US military. If it was published by the media, so what? They were only the messenger.
But still it’s misleading. It counts the number of attacks against US forces. Within about the last year, the number of attacks has just about doubled. But also within the last year, the percentage of *successful* attacks has been cut in half or more. So they attack 2.5 times as often to get the same success. Not really a big deal.
Your complaint about circular news, where we consider something the media publish true because it was published in the media, has a fine example with the iraqi civilian casualties charts. They use the Iraq Body Count numbers for their civilian casualties, when IBC mostly counts casualties that are reported by the media. So I’d consider this particularly unreliable.
Many of the surge numbers do look good, though. On a number of scales they’ve gotten the bad stuff down almost as low as it was this time last year. Perhaps with a bigger surge we can make things even better than last year, so we don’t have to keep running to stay in the same place.
The problem JT isn’t that one side says “Iraq is Woodstock” and the other says “Iraq is the Somme”; the issue is that both sides see a complex, messy situation – worse than some, better than some – and one side immediate calls it “hopeless”.
I can think of three or four graphs – violent deaths/100,000 population in, say Columbia or Zimbabwe or South Africa vs. Iraq that might make Iraq look – relatively – safe.
I can imagine a graph of civilian and military casualties in France that went from 1940 – 1945 that would look as though from 1944 – 1945 we were losing the war.
So nice, but no. Let keep digging, though…there’s interesting stuff here.
A.L.
I’m leaving early tomorrow for the Yearly Kos convention to pick up my treasonous marching orders for the next year. I may not be able to rejoin the thread for a few days.
Guys, here are some fun facts for you…
Violent deaths/1,000 population (source: Brookings study cited, NationMaster.com, CIA Factbook, 2006 FBI Crime Stats)
Washington DC – .29
Jamaica – .32
Gary, IN – .48
South Africa – .50
Columbia – .62
Iraq – 1.22 (annualized Jan – June 07 numbers)
This is an old argument – the point is that the scale of violence in Iraq – while horrible – isn’t that far from other places which we consider bad, problematic, etc. – but not hopeless.
That’s the issue with low-intensity warfare – it’s low-intensity, and as such often takes a long time to play out. Are we doing the right thing? Different set of arguments.
Are things horrible, irremediable, hell on earth? Not so much.
A.L.
AJL –
Have a beer for me…
A.L.
Coming back to the question of MSM bias, I’d like to suggest the following question. Suppose you compared readers of the NY Times in 2003 and 2004 with readers of Juan Cole, and with readers of Arthur Chrenkoff, to pick two critics of MSM coverage with very different viewpoints (if you prefer, substitute WoC for Chrenkoff and Crooked Timber for Cole). Who would have had a more accurate sense of what was likely to happen over the period since then?
AL,
I really do think that you are not so interested in the presentation of an accurate depiction of Iraq as you are in painting a happy picture. This goes for the other war supporters here as well.
For example, J Thomas – attacks are up by a factor of about 2.5 and current year US casualties are about 2.5 times what they were prior year, on a month to month comparison basis (e.g. 43 KIA in July 2006 and 106 KIA in July 2007).
And then, being 2X as violent (by the death metric) as Columbia is a bad state of affairs. However, it’s worse than it appears by that stat. for a couple of reasons. First, the violence is concentrated in certain regions (the numerator) than in several populous areas (the denominator). The Sunni triangle is no doubt many times higher than Columbia and the Shiite port cities probably lower. Second, who is being targeted is an important nuance. The violence is more salient when it is politians, judges, lawyers, clergy and other people responsible for administering the societal infrastructure who are being killed.
Finally, US troop deaths are not included in the CIA stat.
So….Liars and damned statistics…no?
John Quiggen poses an excellent question in #10. I can’t invest the time required to give a full response at this point–it would require a long lookback in the archives at the least.
But my one-off answers (leaving out the usual caveats and qualifiers) are:
* Juan Cole’s (Informed Comment’s) global view gave a better prediction of how events turned out than did the NYT or Arthur Chrenkoff.
* Likewise, for the mainline bloggers and commenters at Crooked Timber over those at WoC (myself included).
Cause for reflection on my part, at the least. And I think (no surprise) that there are factors involved that make this more than just an exercise in “gotcha!” (which I don’t think is how JQ meant it).
Anybody else?
I guess I’ll have to hold myself out as the counterexample on #10; I was clear in my first post that this would be long and hard and that the worst thing we could do was quit in the middle when it got difficult.
In fact, while I never quantified my estimates, I’d say that it is taking about as long as I’d guessed (six to ten years) and that fewer people – on both sides – are dying.
I will say that we have done a far worse job on all fronts than I’d hoped, and that I’ve been pretty critical of issues like treatment of captives, overall COIN practices, and most of all Bush’s flat inability to explain to anyone what we’re doing.
After I make breakfast, I’ll edit links into this.
The key difference between my position and Juan Cole’s is that a) Cole thinks we should lose; and b) Cole thinks we inevitably will lose. I obviously differ on both positions.
A.L.
_”Juan Cole’s (Informed Comment’s) global view gave a better prediction of how events turned out than did the NYT or Arthur Chrenkoff.”_
This comes back to the question of- does Cole have some special insight that so many other dont, or did Cole happen to win the ‘lottery’ by being the guy who predicted the correct debacle? We know perhaps the vast majority of pre anti-war intellectuals and pundits predicted a major disaster _during_ the shooting war, including hundreds of thousands dead and millions of refugees- remember Fortress Baghdad?
I think Cole has some interesting insights into Arab mindsets, but im sure plenty of others who guesses totally missed the mark did as well. Was there something special about Cole, or did he happen to be the guy who staked out the claim that ended up being true? If some different nasty obstacles confronted us (and there would have been, thats the way of war) would it have been some other professor or blogger who people would be going to, and nobody ever heard of Juan Cole?
I think thats a nontrivial question.
Is today’s Juan Cole the same as yesterday’s?
bq. _My mind and heart are, like those of so many Americans, focused on the Gulf and Iraq tonight. I am thinking about all those brave young men and women in the US and British armed forces whose lives are on the line, and send them my warm support. And I am thinking about all the innocent Iraqis in the line of fire, who fear what awaits them. I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides. The rest of us have a responsibility to work to see that the lives lost are redeemed by the building of a genuinely democratic and independent Iraq in the coming years._
“Informed Comment March 19 2003”:http://www.juancole.com/2003_03_01_juancole_archive.html
Another clip from the above Cole link that I thought was interesting. In discussing a report that some Shiites want to join Saddam’s forces to repel the British (and some contrary reports), he said:
_[E]very indication is that a fair proportion of the populace is greeting this invasion rather sullenly. I have to say I am a little surprised that the Shiite South feels this way, if it does. They have been brutalized by the Baath. But Shiite Iraqis were always the most devoted to specifically Iraqi nationalism, and an imperialist invasion may be a hard thing for them to swallow, even if it does remove their tormentor._
Really? That’s a pretty bold statement to just toss out there AL. And while you’re scanning his archives looking for evidence to support it (don’t go to the above listed link whatever you do) you might also link to the support for Iraqi deaths per capita.
I’ll kill time playing with my scale sized Bradley model practicing my parallel parking.
> I’ll kill time playing with my scale sized Bradley model practicing my parallel parking.
I’m not sure if Davebo wrote this to support his main point or to undermine it. But I do know its effect. Beauchamp’s defenders haven’t been doing so well; he could use an informed and articulate champion.
Davebo, I can do the demographics easier…the much-cited Brookings report has a table to the top of Page 14 that lists monthly civilian casualties from Nov. 2006 to June 2007; the 2007 casualties total 16,740. Iraq’s population, per the CIA World factbook is 27.5 million…(16,740*2)/27500 = 1.217
How’s that?
A.L.
A.L.,
My understanding is that the point of this exercise is to demonstrate that support for the war is declining because of the media exaggerates how bad conditions are in Iraq. Once again, I will counter-argue that people’s perceptions are not based on # of explosions, # of attacks, death per 1k ratios, but rather by things such as Mullens testimony yesterday before Congress. However you wish to measure it or to characterize it, the violence in Iraq is sufficient to require 150,000+ US troops in late 2007. THAT’s how bad it is. You can call that hell, limbo or purgatory if you wish, but most people, now, do not want to be involved in a situation that requires this # of troops to quell violence to an acceptable level. The point of the surge is to create breathing space for a political settlement, which is not happening. Just as the point of earlier deployments was to train Iraqi bridgads so that they could stand up and we could stand down. That, too, is not happening. I think that is why people have become discouraged about the course of the war and the likelihood of success, not media coverage. It turns out that it wasn’t just deadenders and there was an insurgency. We were not turning a corner. Things were not improving.
While you are willing to stick it out and believe benefits of the end result will turn out to be worth the cost, you should give more credit to those who disagree and believe that it will not have been worth the price paid, rather than believe they are the dupes of exaggerated media coverage.
one quick point: the surge is quelling some violence. what happens when the surge ends?
one less quick point: regarding the # of attacks, # of killed, etc. that has been discussed and the fact that you can drive through south central and things aren’t all that bad, etc., etc., etc. You know that on 9/11 the vast majority of skyscrappers across the US were not attacked, in 48 out of 50 states, planes did not crash, and less than .00001 percent of the population was murdered. Did the media overreact? Are such statsistics really the best way to think about the quality of life or the extent of a crisis?
_”You know that on 9/11 the vast majority of skyscrappers across the US were not attacked, in 48 out of 50 states, planes did not crash, and less than .00001 percent of the population was murdered. Did the media overreact?”_
No, of course not. But the American people’s tolerance for buildings full of people falling down is zero. Our tolerance for foriegn entities killing American citizens on US soil is zero. Those are rational, universally recognized maxims.
The disconnect in Iraq is in what the American people find acceptable. Personally i find the media much less to blame than our political leadership. It is the President’s responsibility to prepare the nation for war and all it entails. Its his job to keep morale up. Its his job to get Americans invested in winning. He failed at those jobs, and is now playing catchup.
It is, of course, the opposition’s responsibility, to well, be responsible. The mantra that ‘the Americans people are demanding we abandon Iraq no matter the consequences’ is exactly the opposite of leadership. The opposition needs to explain _why_ their plan includes evacuating Iraq, _how_ they will mitigate the consequences (or why they dont matter), and hence demonstrate to the American people that their plan is the correct one regardless of what the polls read.
We’ve got one side of our politics that have tried to breeze by having and eating cake since day one in arrogance and inflexibility, and the other side that has been brazenly unserious and willing to flip to which ever way the wind blows. This is a failure of leadership, of reminding us what war entails and why the sacrifice is worth it, and especially that the casualties we are suffering are historically low while whats at stake is extraordinarilly high. Our entire political establishment has been dismal at that.
Some other facts –
1. “Iraqi deaths spike five months into US troop surge”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070801/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_070801091932;_ylt=AkLgZW57xKXd.K5U_aFokf0UewgF
A third higher than normal in July.
And on the political front – what the surge was supposed to “make room” for:
“Sunni bloc withdrawal from Maliki government”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2007/08/al-tawafuq-with.html
Worth reading Marc’s analysis, always smart.
2. “First, the internal Sunni dimension. Sunni political parties which entered the political process have become increasingly desperate to show any fruits from their participation. They have been accused by their constituents of offering a Sunni fig leaf to a Shia sectarian government, of pursuing personal interests over national or Sunni interests, and of being played for suckers…”
“Second, for the United States it is a blunt indicator that the “surge” has failed. War supporters want us to focus on the tactical level, which is what the shifts in Sunni strategy really amounts to (even if, as I’ve been arguing, those shifts are being consistently misinterpreted). But these tactical military indicators were never supposed to be the point. Back when the new policy was announced, administration officials and top military leaders clearly recognized the priority of the political process: the point of the surge was to create a secure space to allow the chance for political reconciliation…”
Read in full.
At any rate, the arguments that A.L. posts on here, are pretty much thoroughly discredited.
He offers a six to ten year timeline before improvements happen (already nearing 4 1/2 years).
He doesn’t quantify the improvements he wishes for, he never acknowledges that things continually move in the wrong direction. So no verifiability.
He ignores the actual gift that the invasion of Iraq was been, to Al-Queda recruitment.
Pointless analogies, such as the WWII, or, comparisons to Columbia (not a very safe place, BTW), which are non-sensical, and again don’t address the vector of things.
At any rate, the hangers-on will continue to hang on. But the rate of violence, in terms of going down, isn’t that affected by what U.S. troops do, really. There simply isn’t enough coverage, as has been pointed out again and again and again.
The two best “improvements” in the local situation have been the following:
a. A small decrease in some areas, in the civilian deaths.
b. The Sunni locals, working together with the U.S., to take out Al-Queda foreigners.
Both of those improvments are based on the local political scene.
Civilian deaths have decreased in some areas, because those areas have been “cleansed”. No more Sunnis to kill, they’ve either fled, been killed, or removed.
That’s a local decision, by the Shiite militias. The U.S. had no control or power to prevent.
Al-Queda removal. Again, this is a political decision by those who live in those areas. Sunni locals do not want Al-Queda foreigners coming in and telling them what to do,, so they take care of it. And work with the U.S., as they judge the U.S. can help. Doesn’t mean that after Al-Queda is taken care of, they won’t go after U.S. or Shiites again.
The big point here, to emphasize again and again is, tactically, the U.S. can only pacify an area for a little bit. But we have NO CONTROL.
Events are proceeding as they would, without the U.S. here, where this soft partition is happening, with then various blowups between the parties.
Unless we had a 20 to 1 ratio in locals to troops – recommended by Patraeus by the way, and every counterinsurgency expert – our ability to affect things is limited.
Mark B., I don’t think it is US casualties that are at issue here. I think it is Iraqi casualties. At least to the extent that Iraqi casualties are a component of our understanding of the overall situation in Iraq and whether or not it is as bad as the media portrays it.
“Our tolerance for foriegn entities killing American citizens on US soil is zero. Those are rational, universally recognized maxims.” Now, I don’t disagree with this statment…but I think that to the degree that it true, it helps to explain the depth and persistence of the Iraqi insurgency against a foreign entity killing Iraqis on Iraqi soil…and why the likelihood of defeating it is so low.
Suppose in 1861 you had asked a number of people about the outcome of the looming civil war; say, William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas J. Jackson, “Elmer Ellsworth”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_E._Ellsworth or “Edmund Ruffin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Ruffin. Which would be the most reliable prognosticator of events?
Well, that would depend on whether they were prognosticating the situation in 1863, or the situation in 1865.
“This comes back to the question of- does Cole have some special insight that so many other dont….”
Uh, yeah….Juan has a PhD in the subject matter and you have what? Fox News? Additionally, Juan lacks the political/carreer dependent affiliations that some other “experts” have.
A.L. so Juan wants us to lose, eh? You a mind reader or have a personal 1:1 talk you want to share? I’ve never seen him write anything of the sort.
With the possible exception of Sherman, I’ll guess that all of the people you mention would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory (of course meaning different things by that).
That is the general case with war – at least one side and usually both are starting on the basis of badly mistaken expectations.
_”Uh, yeah….Juan has a PhD in the subject matter and you have what?”_
Oh! Appeal to authority! Him fallacy, fallacy, why does that ring a bell… I assume that makes Juan the ONLY PhD that has made predictions about the Middle East? Or they were all right, having made the identical predictions?
_I can think of three or four graphs – violent deaths/100,000 population in, say Columbia or Zimbabwe or South Africa vs. Iraq that might make Iraq look – relatively – safe._
Columbia is relatively safe. Colombia, now….
But there’s a fundamental problem here. Iraq is so bad off that the statistics on death rates are not very good. The statistics this report uses, for example, come from Iraq Body Count which considers a casualty confirmed if the US media report it. The iraqi government data was manipulated during Bremer’s reign to show what Bremer wanted it to. Any reason to think it’s no longer manipulated?
I don’t know how bad the colombia or or zimbabwe or south african reporting is. If they’re bad too then we’re comparing unknowns to unknowns.
_Suppose in 1861 you had asked a number of people about the outcome of the looming civil war; say, William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas J. Jackson, Elmer Ellsworth or Edmund Ruffin. Which would be the most reliable prognosticator of events?_
That depends, doesn’t it? When in 1861?
bq. On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession “legally void”. He stated he had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union.[82]
No intention to invade. That sounds hopeful. He was the decider, if he chose not to invade then there wouldn’t be an invasion.
bq. The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents on the grounds that the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government.
That doesn’t sound hopeful. If he wouldn’t recognise a government and wouldn’t negotiate, what’s the chance he wouldn’t fight?
bq. Northerners rallied behind Lincoln’s call for all of the states to send troops to recapture the forts and to preserve the Union. With the scale of the rebellion apparently small so far, Lincoln called for 74,000 volunteers for 90 days.
So, war.
bq. Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia) which had repeatedly rejected Confederate overtures, now refused to send forces against their neighbors, declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy.
Bigger war.
And then, the outcome depended on how much both sides were willing to lose. Who could predict that? Lincoln came close to losing the 1864 election — he probably would have lost if he hadn’t rigged it, and gotten away with rigging it. What would have happened then? If the union army hadn’t found so many germans to join, who had no qualms about slaughtering fellow americans…. The USA paid a terrible price for that war, because both sides were willing to pay it. Because the yankees weren’t willing to accept any negotiated settlement, and the yankee public wasn’t much aware how bad the fighting was. They found out later.
Who could have known in 1861 how committed both populations were?
Similarly, we can’t know how committed iraqis are to resisting occupation. They might simply give up any day now. If they see that the only alternative is to be genocided, the survivors will give up within a few years. Arab nations tend not to give up when 10% of their population is killed, but they sometimes do when it’s 20%. (Not enough examples to get a real good baseline.) If we were to call in airstrikes on sunni population centers and continue it until 2 million sunnis were dead, they would almost surely give up the insurgency.
Or they might give up sooner if they see a better deal. If only we’d allowed Ba’aths to run for office. Arrest them if they did crimes under Saddam, but let them have their party and let them run their candidates. Give them a solid chance to negotiate as part of the government. But we didn’t, and now it’s a shia government that they’d have trouble developing a place in. Maybe some good choices early would have made all the difference. But now we’re playing catch-up, and it’s very hard.
Whatever happened to that Beauchamp thing, by the way?
Wufnik, Beauchamp is under investigation by the army. He’s forbidden to talk about it.
Double bind. Since he mentioned things that people could get punished for, he has the choice between naming names and getting people in trouble, or not naming names and having all the trouble to himself.
He’s going to be an abject lesson to any soldiers who’re still clueless. Never ever admit in public you’ve observed or heard about anything that violates UCMJ. Or for that matter anything that would sound immoral to civilians.
If you make a US soldier look bad then you make the US army look bad, and that’s a court-martial offense.
Whether you made it up or not.
So JT it obviously doesn’t matter to you whether he made it up or not, then – right?
Want to defend that position?
A.L.
_”He’s going to be an abject lesson to any soldiers who’re still clueless. Never ever admit in public you’ve observed or heard about anything that violates UCMJ. Or for that matter anything that would sound immoral to civilians.”_
He should be an abject lesson. If a soldier observes a violation of the UCMJ its his lawful duty to report it to his superiors- much less to not do so and then trumpet it in the media with opportunity for investigation or verification before the dirty laundry hits the line.
AL, I have no way to tell how much he made it up.
It would probably make sense for him to say at his courtmartial that he made it up — if he tattles on his friends and goes back on duty he isn’t going to have any friends left. He doesn’t have much to go back to after his court-martial regardless. His best bet is to tell them what they want to hear, take his punishment, and then look for a job.
I could suppose from the outraged veterans that he made it up. They have brought up various things he said that they’re ready to say couldn’t happen. Some of what they say is clearly BS but some of it may be right.
But I’ve seen that happen before when they were wrong. I have to accept they’re unreliable about this kind of thing.
I can’t depend on the outcome of his courtmartial. I can’t depend on his confession. I can’t depend on the angry milbloggers. I don’t have much to go on here.
What it means? If he isn’t lying, it means there is a low-morale unit in the army, that probably isn’t getting sufficient supervision by its low-morale noncoms and officers. I can believe that. It doesn’t tell me much.
If he is lying, it means there’s a low-morale soldier in the army, who probably got all the way to iraq because of the army’s recruiting problems. I can certainly believe that. It doesn’t tell me much either.
The big lesson is how hard people are willing to work to keep any unfavorable story from getting accepted. That’s going to result in pretty intense censorship. We aren’t going to get a lot of truth out of military sources. Anything that looks bad will mostly not get through.
_”The big lesson is how hard people are willing to work to keep any unfavorable story from getting accepted.”_
You could have ended that post by saying: ‘The big lesson is how quickly the majority of the media that leans against the war is willing to publish something it has no way of verifying’ and it would have made just as much sense (if not more).
So whats worse- the fairly major media entity that publishes the thing, or the random bloggers that find fault?
JT – so the truth of it is unknowable, and fundamentally doesn’t matter?
A.L.
AL, the truth does matter, but we have no access to it.
So for questions like how long to persevere in the war, we’re left with only the data that’s kind of reliable. How much it costs, how many casualties we get, how many iraqis have fled the country, how much oil they export, things like that. We can look at predictions about how long it will take. I personally tend to think that another 7 years is optimistic, but if Petraeus were to say 7 years that would at least be an expert opinion.
I think we should discout things like political progress made by the iraqi government, because it’s probably mostly irrelevant what the government in the Green Zone decides. People talk like it’s a bad sign that they haven’t agreed on much of anything, but what difference does it really make? It doesn’t matter that they haven’t legislated, because it wouldn’t matter if they did.
Except for military and diplomatic personnel who have unrestricted access to reliable statistics, iraq is mostly a black box now. You can look at the inputs and the outputs, but you can’t tell a lot about what’s really inside the box.
And who has unrestricted access to reliable statistics? Maybe nobody.
Thats an interesting point, and i think very true.
But that doesnt explain why one side draws your ire for quibbling over the details we do have, but the other side apparently gets a pass. Should the ‘professional’ journalists, above all, be held to knowing what you are talking about and reporting as such?
To restate my point at #10, if the MSM preferred to present negative news, they could have published the stories Juan Cole linked to, which were both more negative and more accurate than what they actually reported. Compared to the objective situation, MSM reports have had an optimistic bias.
The obvious source of this bias is the willingness of the MSM to report, fairly uncritically, both official statements of the Administration and leaks from Administration insiders. As is pretty obvious, this info is heavily biased, and there is no source with a bias in the opposite direction.
So, the MSM reports are a mixture of their own reporting, stringers, freelancers and so on with the Admin line. This mix has an inherent pro-war bias, which is reinforced by efforts to discredit reporters (Rather), stringers (Hussain) and freelancers (Beauchamp) whenever they say anything contrary to the Admin line, while giving a free pass to purveyors of leaks like Judy Miller and Michael Gordon.
Mark, I don’t particularly have ire at anybody about this. My thought is I mostly discount the MSM about iraq data, because it isn’t very good. I gather you agree. They can tell us what US officials say and what iraqi officials say. And they can spread rumors.
And I mostly discount milbloggers who say the rumors are wrong. They might know what they’re talking about, but pretty often they don’t. If they disprove some details of a rumor, chances are that rumor got distorted anyway, and something kind of similar might have happened.
So the US public is getting stories that don’t really relate very well. War-supporters want to say the stories make things look extra bad. But when it’s too dangerous to check, that in itself says it’s real, real, bad. Journalists didn’t have a lot of trouble checking things in saigon. Except during Tet and the slog afterward, they didn’t have a lot of trouble checking things in Hue. (Actually, they probably didn’t do a good job there either. Sit in the bar, depend on vietnamese contacts to take them places, depend on their contacts to take them to the right places and meet the right people, never actually cover the ground….)
But the important thing I see is that the rumors our media report out of iraq are pale shadows of the rumors a whole lot of iraqis believe. It usually takes a video to get the US press to cover a scandal. Like, there was a wedding party that got airstriked, and the band was famous in iraq. And they had a video of people dancing at the wedding, and then pictures of the same people dead including the famous lead musician. It started out, the US simply denied it, there was no possibility. They bombed a smuggling base miles from there. But the media looked at the pictures and said it was a wedding party, and when they wouldn’t shut up about it, after awhile the army announced they’d do a full investigation. (But they’d claimed they already investigated before they denied it the first time.) Rumsfeld said even terrorist smugglers have wedding parties.
The media made a big deal out of abu ghraib because of the pictures. They didn’t make a big deal out of the soldier having sex with (raping?) the woman prisoner, or the consultant raping the boy. Those videos were described in text but they didn’t get released.
At Haditha there was a video taken soon after the soldiers left. Without the video, the US media would have ignored it and it would have just gotten denied.
Our media mostly only publicises scandals in iraq when there are videos, or at least convincing photos. But the rumors spread in iraq without needing photos or anything. A lot of iraqis believe that we blew up the Golden Dome, that we have made many attempts to assassinate al Sadr, that we have tried to stir up a civil war so they’d need us to stay, that we have threatened individual iraqi parliament members — if they don’t act right we’ll let a terrorist in to kill them. That we falsified the iraqi election (and our own).
They’re ready to believe all sorts of things about us, because we’re the foreign invaders.
And our media mostly only even mentions the ones where there are vidid pictures and preferably videos. But lots of iraqis believe them all.
4 years of Bush getting everything he wanted.
4 years of Bush f@cking things up.
4 years of blaming the media.
Congratulations!
“4 years of Bush getting everything he wanted.
4 years of Bush f@cking things up.
4 years of blaming the media.
Congratulations!”
This is key – anybody who’s not a fool, when considering reports and predictions, takes the source’s history into account. In the case of the administration, we have almost six years (since fall 2002) of talk to judge them by.
In that time, a war was launched with lofty promises of incredible results, to be achieved with ease. They weren’t.
We’ve seen lofty reports that things were going well. Things were deteroriating.
We’ve seen lofty reports that things weren’t that bad. Things were that bad.
We’ve seen additional lofty reports that things would get better. Things got even worse.
We’ve seen still more lofty reports that things would get better. Things got even far worse.
We’ve seen yet still more additional lofty reports that things would get better. Things got far, far worse, to the point where the pessimists looked like optimists.
We’ve seen man accusations that people giving bad news were not accurately reporting things. They turned out to be reporting things far more accurately than the administration, and the war supporters.
There is a history, and there is a record.
The administration and the war supporters fare rather badly in it.
…welcome visitors from Crooked Timber
A.L.