How long can the fiction be kept up by the Left that the situation in Iraq is more or less the same now as 18 months ago?
It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the “benchmark” legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress — all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington.
As with the Haditha Marines story, and many others, the main stream media gives enormous play to any story that hurts the Bush narrative, and downplays anything that might help it.
But the facts on the ground in Iraq continue to improve, despite the occasional bombing. To the extent that the upcoming election is a referendum on where we go from here on the Iraq war, good news in Iraq hurts the Democrats, which is why those parts of the media who are committed to Obama’s election will continue to give any good news the very minimum of coverage they can, and retain any credibility at all, while any bombing, no matter how rare or isolated, is guaranteed page one material.
McCain pretty much has to get Obama into less moderated debate formats, reducing Obama’s ability to survive on just putting out long canned speeches (which he delivers as well as any actor). The public needs to see Obama trying to respond to tough questions from McCain about why Obama was so wrong about the surge and its effects on Iraqi politics. Obama needs to own up to his opinion, expressed with great certainty in early 2007, that the surge would not, could not work.
It must be tough to be a politician whose hopes for victory depend on bad news for the USA as a whole, or at least on the public not finding out the good news.
So, the questions: how long can Obama and the media keep the American public from finding out
1) How well things are going in Iraq, and the arrow of progress?
2) What happens if we leave prematurely?
3) How wrong Obama was about the surge, and what that means about his vaunted “judgment”?
Some possible good news in this is that the “independent” voters will just start to wake up and look around in a couple of months, and if the good news in Iraq continues, it will be harder and harder to hide it, and Obama’s lack of foresight in the matter.
Prediction: If bad news happens in Iraq, or anything that can be spun that way, expect the major media to trumpet it from every orifice they have. If, on the other hand, things continue as they are, expect the major media to try to paint the election as being about “post-Iraq” issues like the economy, health-care, gas prices, etc.
