Black Box Report

This almost makes up for "A War We Just Might Win."

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day...

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere.

Seven sergeants and specialists who've spent over a year in the thick of it on the ground in Iraq, or a couple of think tank pundits who spend a sheltered week being escorted by Army PR flacks.

Army specialist Buddhika Jayamaha, sergeants Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, and Edward Sandmeier, and staff sergeants Yance T. Gray and Jeremy A. Murphy....or the Brookings Institute's war-supporting, surge-supporting "war critics" Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon.

Who're you going to listen to?

We could listen to the perspective of these men on the front lines, confront the contradictions in our policies and change our approach. Or we could accept the reports from Brookings Institution fly-bys on what the brass told them, and brave words from Senators who travel with armored vehicle escorts and helicopter cover.

Two editorials in the Sunday New York Times; two very different accounts of the situation in Iraq. Apparently O'Hanlon and Pollack, or any of the other Green Zone-visiting politicians who say victory is right around the corner, never spoke to these soldiers. It's almost as if they studiously avoided getting any views that would throw a wet blanket over their happy talk. There's a word for that kind of rose-colored rhetoric:

This is the most accurate and courageous…account of the war in Iraq that I've seen. It puts to shame--and shame is the appropriate word--all the Kristol, McCain, Lieberman, Pollack and O'Hanlon etc etc cheerleading of the past two months.

Fortunately for them, the Kristols, Liebermans and O'Hanlons of the world - wrong so often on Iraq and yet still pontificating freely on the subject - are clearly incapable of shame. Otherwise they would sit quietly on the sidelines, embarrassed at their complicity in cheerleading this fiasco. Cheerleading which, as the op-ed points out, is from an American point of view, for American goals:

Our agenda for solving the Iraqi people's problems is not the same as that of the Iraqis themselves...In fact, our very belief in a stable, multi-ethnic, equitable democracy is part of the problem. As the authors uncomfortably remind us, there will be winners and losers in this Iraqi civil war, and it will be the Iraqis that decide it.

Well, this certainly won't play well with the rightwing narrative:

Obviously these...soldiers — NCOs and infantrymen — are America-hating defeatists who give aid and comfort to our enemies. That is the storyline, right? Anyone who questions our strategy in Iraq is basically an Al Qaeda public relations man? Did I get that right? And the mainstream media is nothing but a machine that spews defeatist lies? I got all that right, didn’t I?....

Chiropractors should have a busy month tending to the sprains and contortion-related injuries of the Jihad-Watch bloggers as they struggle to follow their natural instincts and attack anyone who diagrees with them, while conversely aware that attacking the troops would not go over well. John Cole, all too familiar with what happenes to apostates of the glorious war, predicts how rightwing bloggers will react:

While these guys are in the 82nd Airborne, you can see that what they write is sure to infuriate the patriots in the 101st Chairborne. I wonder if they are going to have the nerve to ratchet up the smear machine against these guys...I am betting that since they don't, they will choose (to) ignore the op-ed completely.

See his update here. It goes well with Digby's prediction:

I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren't-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren't capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They're very sweet, but let's get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys...

And right on cue...

On MSNBC last night, Tucker Carlson devoted a six-minute segment to the troops’ op-ed, but the discussion centered around why the authors of the piece aren’t credible (”they’re looking at the world through a straw”), and why speaking out about realities on the ground in Iraq is a “detriment to the moral authority” of the military.

So...with a media so concerned about being "fair and balanced," even when that means giving air time to someone who claims the earth is flat, just to provide "balance" to all those round-earthers, the soldier's op-ed will get just as much around-the-clock-10-day-news-cycle attention that the O'Hanlon / Pollack piece got, right?

Right?

Wrong.