A Good Thing You Don’t Hear About Iraq

In a world of information management, the most relevant news is the least published.

One of the principle points of American coverage of Iraq is the reflection of the audience. For the most part, coverage is simple and stupid because American’s knowledge of Iraq is at best, simple and stupid. Complex news and events are decoded and primed into headlines, morphing information to include terrorist, insurgent, al-Qaeda, Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish without any relevance to what is actually occurring. The media has pandered to American sensibilities (body counts, landmark dates, etc.) and skewed our belief of how things are going there (a quick trip to CNN.com reiterates this point — the first headline at this time reads “Two die in downing of U.S. copter in Iraq”).

My basic view is that we shouldn’t be in Iraq, but we are, so we have to live with that fact for the time being. Things aren’t going horribly, even though the training of troops seems to be going poorly, the lack of stability in the Iraqi government, and the increasing body count of American troops. But to acknowledge the difficulties while downplaying the progress has been a theme of the American op-ed room and television news. The media has captured a sense of everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and Americans seem to have silently accepted the cynicism that Iraq will be a partial success at best.

Reasons? This article is one of them, detailing the involvement of local militias fighting off foreign-backed insurgency units, (Read this NY Times article about local battles as well. Yes, maybe the phrase ‘local militia’ strikes a sense of fear, but these are what are being used for local protection. For every Western diplomat or journalist you hear as being kidnapped, there are 20 Iraqi’s in similar situations. While not being lawless, Iraq is poor, and where there was predicted to be civil war, there has only been crime showing the sign’s of poverty, rather than political motivation. Iraqi’s will be able to stand on their own two feet soon, and it’s good to see them being proactive about the safety (or at least foreign involvement) in their country. While it may be discouraging to see violence continuing, Iraqi’s are becoming increasingly involved in self-determination and the emergence of a politically and economically sovereign country.