Iraq War: Fading from the news?

There's been some grumping lately in the blogosphere about how our mainstream media is starting to de-emphasize news of the Iraq War, meekly going along with the administration's transparent pretence that the "sovereign" government of Iraq is somehow actually independent, and not a puppet regime of the US.

For those who fret over terms like "puppet regime," I'm not sure what else the current government could be, even under the best of circumstances.  But there's little benefit in hashing over what-if scenarios (like having it be a UN-directed transition government) that the Bush administration was never going to allow in any case.

The cravenness of the US political press has been painfully evident, so far.  And so I don't find it hard to believe that editors and publishers are once again going along with the Bush team's spin on the matter.

But I don't worry that the Iraq War can be quietly managed out of prominent news coverage the way the Afghan War was.  For one thing, the Afghan War was ignored in large part because of the Iraq War, impending and actual.  For another, the Iraq War involves a lot more American troops and has strained the army's ability to deploy troops in any other conflict to the maximum.

Yet another is that Iraq is a major-oil producing country in the heart of the Middle East; the US presence there is a far more volatile issue across the Middle East than in Afghanistan.  And the Iraq War was a major turning point in the US relationship with the world, isolating the United States badly.  As willing as our press may be to beat the drums of war for the Bush crew, it's just not possible for them to either ignore it or to print stories that reflect the fantastic view of the war promoted by the Bush administration for those who still want to believe.

A number of the blogs and other sites to which I display links here at Old Hickory's Weblog do focus on the Iraq and Afghan Wars:  Juan Cole's blog, Billmon, Steve Gilliard, Daily Kos, the War News site, Warblogging.  The Iraq Casualties link provides updates on the cost in human life of this war.

Juan Cole, as an expert on Shia Islam in Iran and Iraq, has been an important contributor to the public discussion of the Iraq War, and a very constructive one.  This undated 2003 interview with him contains some valuable observations:  Michigan Today An Informed Commentator.  Including these:

I believe that there were people in the current administration who would very much have liked to take care of Iraq quickly, stabilize it, reduce forces there to about a divisionthat's 20,000 peopleand then go on to Syria and Iran and pursue an objective of American conquest, reshaping the region by force. I think those voices have been marginalized. It's inconceivable to me that Congress would authorize such a thing. And the military, particularly the officer corps, would not go along with the idea of trying to conquer and occupy Syria or Iran at this point. The United States simply doesn't have an army large enough to make that possible to begin with. But it is also very clear what would happen if we tried. Iran is three times bigger than Iraq. I think that the super-hawks in the administration have lost. Iraq has turned into a nightmare for them. I don't see a good exit strategy, and I am worried about that because, whereas when things got extremely bad, the United States could simply leave Vietnam, get on helicopters and fly away, Iraq is a major petroleum producer at the head of the Persian Gulf and could not be allowed to fall into chaos. I think it's very unlikely that the US administration would allow that to happen or remain in power for very long if it did. So even if there is a change in November, I don't see what way the US can get out of Iraq now. Until a new Iraqi military force can be established that can provide security, the US is going to have to do it. I don't think there are many allies in NATO who are going to be eager to send lots of troops to Iraq after seeing what happened to American troops. (my emphasis)

Senator [John] Kerry and Senator [Joseph] Biden and others have called for an internationalization of the Iraq enterprise. I just don't understand under what circumstances other nations will be willing to be drawn into what looks increasingly like a major quagmire. My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.

Although Kerry and Edwards won't feel like they are able to express such a pessimistic view on the campaign trail, and the immediate electoral demands won't require them to, that's the situation a President Kerry would face in January.  It's also the situation President Bush faces right now, and can't admit it or take realistic actions based on that reality.  Instead, he's stuck in a war that will not have a good outcome for the United States.

The sentence I emphasized in Cole's comment is a key thing.  Prewar Iraq had a regular army of 400,000 soldiers, probably the minimum an independent Iraq needs with its neighbors' present level of soldiers under arms.  Current US plans limit the future Iraqi army to 40,000.  The last I heard (a few years ago), only a few thousand of those were trained and on duty. And retaining those who are there is extremely difficult.

As a practical matter, even a Kerry administration eager to get US troops out of Iraq will find a precipitate exit difficult as long the national army of Iraq is at a 40,000 level.  And it's a long way from even that right now.

Cole also gives one of the best succinct explanations I've seen about the journalistic convention of "balance" has served the public poorly during the Iraq War and, even more so, during the buildup to war:

I think that academic modes of thinking and evidence are anti-partisan in their nature, and so I think things balance out in that way. I reject the argument that balance is achieved by making sure that you have both sides of the story. This is very common in journalism, especially television journalism, and it appeals to politicians and the public. There are not "sides to a story" when doing research. There is evidence, and there are explanations that the evidence reveals. One would not want a cancer institute at a major university to be forced by the government to make sure that they had a balanced view of the causes of cancer and to be forced to hire some researchers who insisted that smoking does not cause cancer. I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research. We would end up with a lot of academics in that kind of situation who would maintain that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which was what was beingmaintained by think tanks and talking heads on television and government officials, precisely because they did have this flawed idea of "balance" that they were trying to pursue. If actual research had been done, then this error could have easily been exposed.