Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:

The Guardian claimed that the “surge” in Iraq was about to unravel because of strike threats from Sunni militiamen they reported last week, but if you head over to a newly-redesigned Pajamas Media today, you’ll see that the threats of a strike were resolved weeks before the Guardian stories ran.

The stories were an attempt to grab defeat in the media while the threat of actual defeat on the ground seems ever more fleeting.

Yesterday, left-wing surrogate McClatchy Newspapers — they even have the ridiculous “Truth to Power” tagline — attempted to claim defeat from the opposite perspective, noting that some of the Sadrists in Iraq seem to be feeling a bit rambunctious after a long period of relative silence.

The left side of the blogosphere, always willing to latch on to even the hint of bad news without even pretending to vet their sources, were quick to declare this as reason 6,578,902 that we’ve already lost the war in Iraq and it is time for our troops to come home, or to at least within spitting distance.

Reality, of course, is another story.

It has long been known that at some point the Iraqi government would have to take on the criminal element that gravitated to the Sadrists, and unfortunately for these Sadrists, they waited far too long to engage. They haven’t stood a chance of a military victory against IA forces for at least two years, which is why al Sadr himself continues to issue ceasefires from the safety of Tehran. Recent attempts by Sadrists to use threats and the force of arms for political ends is now likely to consolidate the power of the central government behind a string of Sadrist defeats in Basra and Baghdad.

Those on the left seem to think that any deviation from stasis in Iraq is a sign of failure, but the fact is that for a society to be stable, the government must first establish a monopoly of force.

Part of that involves either incorporating or destroying militias. In Sunni provinces, the Iraqi government is slowly incorporating the Sons of Iraq into both security and non-security positions even as they root-out the remains of al Qaeda. In Shiite areas including parts of Baghdad and Basra, this means eliminating the influence of criminal gangs hiding under al Sadr’s banner.

The conflict isn’t exactly a welcome development—even a temporary increase in violence will impact the innocent — but the longer-term consolidation of power by the federal government requires an eventual dissolution of Sadr’s militia. Most hoped that such a dissolution of al Sadr’s power would be purely political in nature, but the Sadrist gangs seem to have made the mistake of engaging Iraq’s modernized security forces directly, the resolution of the long-expected inter-sect conflict will likely be more immediate than most expected, and much to Muqtada al-Sadr’s dismay.