August 08, 2004

Iraq: Some of the Biggest Stories The Media has Suppressed

Karl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of The American Enterprise, recently spent three months with Coalition soldiers on combat patrols. His observations are not to be missed.

If I tell you that scores of Iraqi detainees have been killed and maimed this year in Abu Ghraib prison, you may not be surprised. But you’re probably guessing wrong about who hurt them. The moronic American guards who are now on trial for improperly humiliating some Iraqis caused no deaths or injuries: The many casualties in the prison were all inflicted by Iraq’s guerilla terrorists.

During this spring’s frenzy of reporting on the plight of detainees at Abu Ghraib, I was surprised that none of the stories mentioned what anyone who has spent time at the prison (as I have) knows is the central danger to the prisoners there. By far the gravest threats to the Iraqis in that facility are the mortars and rockets that guerillas regularly lob into the compound knowing full well that the main victims of their indiscriminate assaults will be fellow Iraqis. One attack on April 21 of this year, for instance, killed 22 detainees and injured another 91.

Somehow the media forgot to mention that. The reason being that it would have detracted from their story of the mistreatment of prisoners there. That mistreatment would have seemed less important when juxtaposed with the actual killings of scores of those prisoners by Iraqi guerrilla terrorists.

It also would have rightfully angered people in the U.S. still further against those terrorists, at a time when big media is supporting the terrorists by calling them “radicals” and “insurgents” rather than murderers, killers and terrorists. Imagine how strongly public opinion would be outraged at the guerrillas if it were revealed that they were killing their own fellow-countrymen, by shooting them like fish in a barrel?

I think, if anything, Karl’s been too easy on the media in this article.

Or take another of the Iraq stories most loudly trumpeted in our media: the electricity shortages. You know Baghdad continues to suffer periodic blackouts news reports remind us of that ad nauseum. Just one more example of U.S. ineffectiveness in this war: The generating system is broken and nothing gets fixed, right?

Wrong. Despite continuing efforts by guerillas to sabotage the grid, Iraq is now generating more electricity than existed in the country before the war. So why do we continue to hear about shortages? Two reasons:

First, Saddam shamelessly hogged the country’s electricity in his capital, shunting 57 percent to Baghdad while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 percent of the total. Though that means occasional shortages in privileged neighborhoods unused to such things, Iraqis as a whole are better off.

Second, Iraq is in the midst of a consumer surge. The economy will grow an estimated 60 percent this year. Iraqis, who have flocked to cell phones and imported a million cars, are also snatching up washing machines, air conditioners, and electronic devices never before available to them. A third of the country now has satellite TV. Electricity demand is thus rising even faster than the steady increases in generation.

We’ve brought a successful democratic economy, in what historically is an eye-blink, to a region that has been oppressed for decades. We’ve done tremendous good to the people of Iraq. We’ve made an a powerful ally in the midst of nations which harbor terrorists. We’ve successfully erased a nation which harbored and supported terrorists.

(Hussein financially rewarded families of terrorists who killed Israelis. Anyone arguing that such terrorists would never want to kill Americans on U.S. soil is kidding themselves.)

And we’ve created a new trading partner which will generate billions in trade over the years to come, offsetting the costs of the war.

Over the last year and a quarter, America’s major media have given us millions of words about the Iraq struggle, most of them accurate. Yet they’ve often done a poor job of communicating the big, important truths about developments in that country. The very largest, most critical truth they’ve missed is that the Shiite middle has stuck with us through many travails.

This was demonstrated again when the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr went on the warpath during the spring. Scads of reporters and newsroom analysts declared a general uprising, the loss of majority Shiite support, the beginning of the end for the U.S. in Iraq. “United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising,” announced the lead sentence of an April 7 New York Times story written from Washington. A Newsweek headline on April 10 screamed: “THE IRAQI INTIFADA: Suddenly the insurgency is much broader and much more dangerous than anyone had imagined it could become.”

These reports were wrong. Ordinary Shiites and Shia leaders alike subsequently made it clear that the mad cleric does not speak for the majority of them. They quietly plotted amongst themselves and with the Coalition to neutralize Sadr. His uprising petered out.

Read the whole thing.