| December 2004 | ||||||
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| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
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| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
On what the US achieved:
Coalition troops killed 1,200 to 1,600 guerrillas and captured more than 1,000. They uncovered 26 bomb factories, 350 arms caches (containing thousands of weapons), several chemical weapons laboratories and eight houses where hostages were held and probably tortured and killed. And they accomplished all this with less than half the number of casualties suffered in Hue, Vietnam, in 1968, the last major urban assault mounted by the Marine Corps.
...The clashes with Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia this summer proves the point: After being whipped by U.S. forces, the Shiite rabble-rouser decided to join the electoral process. Sadr City, once among the most dangerous areas of Iraq for U.S. troops, has become relatively quiet. The hope now is that the fall of Fallouja will convince more Sunnis of the futility of armed resistance, while elections on Jan. 30 will convince them that their grievances can be addressed through peaceful means.
On the pro-terrorist bias of Al Jazeera:
...The only major PR snafu came when a journalist taped a Marine shooting a wounded insurgent. Though endlessly replayed on Al Jazeera (which refused to show the video of terrorists apparently slaughtering aid worker Margaret Hassan), there is no sign that this action has cost the U.S. any public support in Iraq. On the contrary, many Iraqis, fed up with terrorist attacks, no doubt applauded the Marine’s ruthlessness.
On the setbacks:
This is not meant to suggest that everything went perfectly. Many terrorists were able to escape Fallouja before the assault and create mayhem in Mosul, where the local police folded with dismaying speed. But U.S. and Iraqi forces quickly shifted their focus to the north and snuffed out the uprising in Mosul. Now they are pressing their offensive in the “triangle of death” south of Baghdad.
On what it means for the future:
Even in a best-case scenario, however, the bombings and beheadings won’t end the day after the vote. It can take a decade or more to defeat an insurgency
...Thus, for all their success in Fallouja, we should not expect U.S. troops to completely pacify Iraq anytime soon. What they can do what they are doing is to keep the insurgents from derailing a political process that, one hopes, will soon result in the creation of a legitimate government that can field indigenous security forces and defend itself.
This week’s Carnival of the Vanities, created by Bigwig of Silflay Hraka, is at Ashish’s Niti.
Next week this weblog will be honored to host the 116th edition of COTV.
Articles should be submitted to me at this email address. Please include:
Thanks! I look forward to hosting another great edition of COTV.
Peggy Noonan: CBS Didn’t Change; The Rest of the World Did. From her current article on Dan Rather, for whom she worked:
Two things to be said here. One is that CBS News hasn’t changed that much, and the other is that the media world in which it operates has changed completely. The whole context has changed. No one has to accept the enforced corporate liberalism of the networks anymore, as they did from 1950 through 1990. They have options, from cable to Fox to the Internet to hundreds and thousands of radio shows, newspapers, magazines. The old network hegemony is over. That’s why network news viewership is down, that’s why the evening news isn’t appointment TV anymore. America didn’t turn crazily right, Americans just finally got political options in how they’d get the news, and took advantage of them.
As I noted in a previous post, MSM will have to reform.
They’ll have to faithfully renew their grand tradition, their rightful, honorable mission, which is reporting the news, rather than reporting just the news that supports the Left, and suppressing the rest of it. They’ll have to do what the NY Times slogan says: not “All the News That Supports the Left,” but “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
It’s very honorable to report all the news, precisely because it may not all support the candidate you yourself favor. There’s nobility in that.
