Where Did Iraq Go?

Guest Column  |  By Nicholas Guariglia  |  June 4, 2008

Violence in Iraq has reached a four-year low. The U.S. casualty rate is now 0.72 deaths per day, constituting the eighth month in a row of dramatic improvements as compared to the 4.2 deaths per day from this time last year. Iraqi civilian deaths, too, are down. For some perspective, the monthly murder tolls in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City were 48.7, 51.9, and 49.3 a few years ago. Today, less than 400 Iraqi citizens - throughout the whole country, not just a few cities - perish on a monthly basis. And this is a war zone.

I guess it could be said that from '03-'06, the international press and the mainstream media did not report the "good news" from Iraq because good news was scarce. Outside of some brave freelancers, most reporters stayed safe in their Baghdad hotels and reported only on explosions from afar, which were known about only because of an ever-quick newswire.

In the past few months, however, many of our friends in the Western press have exposed to us something worse than blatant bias: we're seeing a barefaced misunderstanding and miscomprehension of what is happening on the ground in-theater. The recent skirmishes in Basra, and the more recent crackdown in Mosul, have served as an example of this phenomenon.

Last June, Reuters reported that 20 decapitated Iraqi bodies were found near Salman Pak. They quoted unnamed sources to confirm the validity of this supposed massacre. Later that week, it was concluded that the story was false.

In October, Mark Kukis of Time, rushing to meet his required deadline, also told the world that 20 "headless" bodies were found in Baquba. Later that day, Maj. Winfield Danielson confirmed that the story was entirely untrue.

In April, Kukis reported that Muqtada al Sadr's "political power appears to be growing." By May, it is now clear that Kukis should consider membership to the Flat Earth Society.

The New York Times, never failing to disappoint, almost gleefully reported that one of the main Sunni blocs in the Iraqi parliament - Adnan Dulaimi's "Tawafiq" bloc - would extend its year-long boycott of the government. What the Times failed to acknowledge was that the Iraqi government, just the other day, applied amnesty laws to certain Iraqi politicians accused of wrongdoing. Dulaimi, who is charged of "terrorism," did not qualify for such amnesty; two points the paper failed to mention.

In gets weirder: the ever-prestigious Associated Press reporters Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra put out a strange narrative hinting that Ayatollah Sistani, whose support the U.S. couldn't have done without, will just out-of-the-blue declare "Jihad" against the U.S. in the coming days. (Sistani's aides are, obviously, denying this ludicrous story.)

I'm going to go out on a limb: Sistani will not declare jihad on anyone. And Hendawi and Abdul-Zahra will not have to clarify their baloney of a press release.

Misrepresentations of this sort, whether unintentional or duplicitous, happen every day. Keen followers of Iraq can pick them out as they read various reports, papers, and articles. If you are an interested observer of what is happening in Iraq, and you receive your primary sources of information from Mark Kukis, Juan Cole, the Reuters and Associated Press newswire, the New York Times, or Jack Cafferty's old man rants on CNN, you will walk away with a not-too-very astute impression of the country.

As this is written, Operation Calvary Charge in Basra was a stunning success for Iraq's premier Nouri Maliki, and the Iraqi military, against Iranian instrumentalities. Normalcy is returning to that troubled city, where in the past crazed Iranian-backed theocrats - both associated with Sadr and separate from him - would enforce ridiculous and puritanical laws on Basra's citizenry, particularly women. And yet, if you had picked up a paper in March, you would have come to the conclusion that Maliki was on the verge of resigning, at the least, and, at the most, seeking exile Shah-style, somewhere far, far away from his home state.

Like in Basra, Maliki's war cabinet is traveling to Mosul - al Qaeda's last urban bastion in Iraq. Between flushing al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) out of its final stronghold, and contemplating forming his own political bloc, Maliki is traveling to a UN conference in Sweden to get countries to forgive Iraq of its debt.

As the dust settles in Basra, and as the facts begin to emerge out of Mosul and Sadr City - where the Iraqi government has, for the first time, established a domineering presence - the media's hysteria begins to fade away. Just what happened to those predictions that declared Maliki toast? Will those in the press who swore Basra a failure in March be held to account for their sub-par journalism and near-insane neglect of actuality?

With the exception of some obviously inaccurate news stories, reporting on Iraq is seemingly nonexistent nowadays. Nobody is having a serious intellectual discourse about the improvements made, and the challenges that rest ahead; we're not even talking about how we're not talking about it.

Here are the facts: Across the country, Shi'ite tribes have turned on Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias, and Sunni tribes have turned on AQI. Iraqi servicemen are performing remarkably well, and distinctly better than last year. Maliki has never been this politically empowered.

After the Iraqi military finishes off al Qaeda in Mosul, AQI will be without a home in Iraq. Al Qaeda honchos are the first to acknowledge the state of their affairs, writing a dismal portrayal of their hopes on Al-Ekhlaas, a website sympathetic to and organized by the terror group. In the testimony - written by the pseudonym "Dir'a limen wehhed," or "Shield for the Monotheist" - al Qaeda admits that it orchestrated 334 attacks in November '06, 292 attacks in May '07, just 25 attacks in November '07, and has only managed 16 assaults in May '08.

Another year or two of this sustained pressure, and our strategic gains will be irreversible... if they are not already. Western journalists and reporters are missing the biggest story to ever come out of this terrible conflict: Iraqis are on the verge of crossing a threshold.

They're going to make it.