Blatant Reality

Power Line has a great article that shows just what success in Iraq looks like. What makes this article so great you ask? All the pretty pictures and graphs of course. The information on those pictures and graphs is also pretty cool.

Gateway Pundit posted an article today linking to an AP story that stated that by March, the Anbar province will be handed over the the Iraqi military and police. The success experienced there can only be attributed to the Surge. The post also includes several quotes from leading democrats about how the Surge isn’t working.  I would recommend reading them because they are quite funny when you look at them in the light of our obvious success.

Today, two Iraqi soldiers threw themselves onto a suicide bomber who had entered a large crowd. Sadly, the bomb went off killing both soldiers and several in the crowd. The interesting thing about this attack is what the two slain soldiers are referred to.

Two Iraqi soldiers were killed when they tried to thwart the attack by throwing themselves on the bomber who had slipped into the crowd, The Associated Press reports.

 

The bomber detonated his explosives vest, and killed an additional nine people, including three police officers and four civilians, an Interior Ministry official told CNN.

 

“These two Iraqi martyrs gave their lives so that others might live,” according to a statement issued by the U.S. military, the AP reports.

Referring to these soldiers as “martyrs” is a pretty serious statement. Martyrs are people who can galvanize the populace into action. Terrorists refer to their dead as martyrs for the cause. If the Iraqi people do view these soldiers as martyrs, it could further turn the populace against al Queda and other terrorists.

Major Andrew Olmsted, a longtime military blogger and soldier, died yesterday in Iraq. I had never read any of his posts until I read his posthumous essay but it made me feel like I knew him personally and moved me deeply. My prayers truly go out to his friends and family.

I subscribe to Google News Alerts, a service that emails me news articles for topics I specify, and the Iraq War is one of such topics. Today, I received an email from Google that had these two news articles in in: “2007: Deadliest year for US forces in Iraq” and “US December death toll in Iraq second-lowest of war“. Now, both articles state the same two basic facts: 2007 was the deadliest year in Iraq and December had the second lowest monthly death toll of the war. However, as you can see from the titles of the stories, each spins this information to show a different light.

My question to you now is how will you view 2007? Will you view it as a year where we initiated a successful plan in Iraq or only as the deadliest year in Iraq? Are you a glass is half empty or half full kind of person?

Gateway Pundit has a good article on the military deaths in Iraq and the media’s spin on this subject.

The apparent success of the surge in Iraq is definitely something that has been overlooked in the media today. This overlook (or intentional ignoring) of our success is regretful because, as Michael Barone explains, there are many lessons we can learn from the surge. Here is just one of the lessons Barone gives in this article:

Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush’s critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues — even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.

 

But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

 

Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.

As the article states in the last paragraph, the success of the surge in Iraq is definitely “something to be thankful for as the new year begins.”

Michelle Malkin does a nice job outlining the events that happened over the past year concerning the Iraq War. Its pretty long but its a good article.

This story is just amazing.

Ala’a was 9 years old, strong of will but weak of body — he suffered from cerebral palsy and weighed just 55 pounds. He lived among about 20 kids with physical or mental disabilities at the Mother Teresa orphanage, under the care of nuns who preserved this small oasis in a dangerous place.

 

On Sept. 6, 2003, halfway through his 13-month deployment, Southworth and his military police unit paid a visit to the orphanage. They played and chatted with the children; Southworth was talking with one little girl when Ala’a dragged his body to the soldier’s side.

 

Black haired and brown eyed, Ala’a spoke to the 31-year-old American in the limited English he had learned from the sisters. He recalled the bombs that struck government buildings across the Tigris River.

 

“Bomb-Bing! Bomb-Bing!” Ala’a said, raising and lowering his fist.

 

“I’m here now. You’re fine,” the captain said.

 

Over the next 10 months, the unit returned to the orphanage again and again. The soldiers would race kids in their wheelchairs, sit them in Humvees and help the sisters feed them.

 

To Southworth, Ala’a was like a little brother. But Ala’a — who had longed for a soldier to rescue him — secretly began referring to Southworth as “Baba,” Arabic for “Daddy.”

 

Then, around Christmas, a sister told Southworth that Ala’a was getting too big. He would have to move to a government-run facility within a year.

 

“Best case scenario was that he would stare at a blank wall for the rest of his life,” Southworth said.

 

To this day, he recalls the moment when he resolved that that would not happen.

 

“I’ll adopt him,” he said.

Read the whole thing. It is truly an awesome and uplifting story.

(Hat Tip Hot Air)

Michael Yon is scheduled to appear this weekend on CNN for their “This Week at War” series.

With recent reports showing that the surge is, in fact, working in Iraq, you would think that the news reports from Iraq would stay the same or actually increase in number. However, we can see that this is not the case. The top three news agencies, ABC, CBS, and NBC, have actually seen a decrease in the number of stories concerning the war, according to a recent study by the Media Research Center. Also, by using Google Trends, we can even see a sharp decrease in the number of stories online about the Iraq War as early as the end of September. The graph below represents the number of searches for the Iraq War on the top and the number of news references of Iraq War on the bottom.

As you can see, the number of searches for the Iraq War stayed the same while the number of stories out there sharply decreased. This decrease of news stories availability was easily the largest so far this year. Could this be attributed to the success in Iraq? The media’s coverage has almost dropped to nil concerning Afghanistan because we, on the whole, are actually accomplishing our goals there. If the surge keeps working and everything else remains constant, I bet that we will see a continuing drop in media coverage of Iraq.

For those of you who don’t understand how Google Trends works or would like to learn more about it, go here.