What we don't know, what we do

Our anglophile co-conspirator, Dr. Emile, has bemoaned the lack of facticity coming out of Iraq from the mainstream media. This “fog of war” phenomenon bears resemblance to all previous wars, of course, but the latter ones that occurred within the realm of high-speed communications and television bear the closest analogies. A Vietnam comparison to the present is always fraught, but it was probably the first war in which those media consumers at home could watch/read/listen to war reporting unravel almost in real time, leading to a popular distrust of government assertions and first reports. This is not to say that many younger reporters didn’t do an excellent job at cracking through all the BS to get some amazing details and stories during the Vietnam War, in particular, Johnathan Schell, Peter Arnett, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan all made their careers in that theatre. Their successes, however, coming on the heels of so many optimistic exaggerations and outright lies from their older colleagues reinforced the skeptical regard towards accepting prima facie facts of how the war was really progressing.

Last month, for example, I first heard the heartening news on BBC radio that an Iraqi commando force of 500 had wiped out an insurgent camp north of Bagdhad, killing 85 international jihadis in the process. Then the prima facie print report came out that showed, at least, a bit more help from US forces than the radio version. The basic facts, however, seemed to be the same:

The Iraqi Interior Ministry statement said 85 insurgents had been killed, and that the fighters had been planning to attack the town of Samarra, 34 miles east of the lake, with a large number of car bombs found at the camp.

A week later, and the Washington Post ran the skeptics version of events, throwing up at least three different possibilities as to what had occurred:

Maj. Richard L. Goldenberg, spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division, said, "I can't confirm the estimate" given by Iraq about the number of insurgents killed in the fight. He said that by the time additional U.S. ground forces arrived, "the insurgent forces who had fled . . . were able to recover their casualties and take them with them."

Noting that an Islamic militant group had said 11 insurgents were killed, Goldenberg said: "I would tell you that somewhere between 11 and 80 lies an accurate number."

Goldenberg said crewmen who provided support in two Apache attack helicopters and an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter later estimated that 80 to 100 insurgents participated in the fighting. Asked how 85 bodies could have been carried away, Goldenberg referred the question to the Interior Ministry.

But then the reporting took an even weirder turn:

The news service Agence France-Presse reported that one of its correspondents visited the site Wednesday and found that 30 to 40 insurgents were still there. A man who identified himself as "Amer" and claimed membership in the militant Secret Islamic Army of Iraq said 11 insurgents were killed in the raid. [emphasis added]

What’s this? Are the Frogs making this up? What could it possibly mean that the insurgent camp was “still there” ?! Was it wiped out or not? We just don’t know.

Nor do we have much of an idea of how well the majority of the citizens of Basra are enjoying their new lives under Shiite theocracy. However, we are beginning to realize, that is, we do actually know, that some pretty serious mistakes were made in planning for the aftermath of the war, and that these errors are continuing to occur:

The State Department has ordered a major reevaluation of the troubled $18.4-billion Iraq reconstruction effort, blaming problems on early decisions to hire U.S. firms for major infrastructure projects. . . .

The report, along with an earlier draft obtained by the Los Angeles Times, offers the most sweeping analysis to date of the failures in the reconstruction process and presents the most detailed road map yet for the future of the program.

The adjustment, the third such funding change in nine months, is the latest sign of disarray in the effort to help quell the insurgency by improving living standards and providing jobs for Iraqis.

The fact here, relatively unchallenged at present, is that reconstruction was shortchanged at the outset and is not getting done the way it desperately needs to be.