Fish in a Barrel

On my previous blog, I loved picking apart Jack Kelley's columns in The Blade. His columns are chock-a-block with deceptions, bad logic and partial truths and yawning lacunae, and lately I just have had the energy to tackle his bullshit. But this week I stumbled across a few articles that completely refute his latest column, so I'll accept this gift of the blogging gods and tear into Saturday's piece.

"Media's Scaremongers" takes one story from the Washington Post and "proves" that the mainstream media is engaged in a full-on attack on President Bush's Iraq policies.

"I just read yet another distorted and grossly exaggerated story from a major news organization about the 'failures' in the war in Iraq," Lt. Col. Tim Ryan, a battalion commander in the First Cavalry Division, wrote in an e-mail to friends.

"Print and video journalists are covering only a small fraction of the events in Iraq, and more often than not, the events they cover are only the bad ones," said Lieutenant Ryan, who is now stationed in Fallujah. "Many of the journalists making public assessments about the progress of the war in Iraq are unqualified to do so, given their training and experience. The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq."

The column offers no hard evidence that things in Iraq are just peachy, just the claim that things are fine.

But then, we have this: hard analysis of the government's own statistics by Knight-Ridder:

A Knight Ridder analysis of U.S. government statistics shows that through all the major turning points that raised hopes of peace in Iraq, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency, led mainly by Sunni Muslims, has become deadlier and more effective.

The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes - such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength - the United States won't win the war. It's axiomatic among military thinkers that insurgencies are especially hard to defeat because the insurgents' goal isn't to win in a conventional sense but merely to survive until the will of the occupying power is sapped. Recent polls already suggest an erosion of support among Americans for the war.

Fatalities, casualties, attacks and terrorists attacks are all on the rise. Electricity and oil production are below pre-war levels. There is good news, but the trends are not moving in the right direction:

These developments, however, have had little impact on the broader trends that have moved against the United States through all the spikes and lulls in violence.

Most worrisome, the insurgency is getting larger.

At the close of 2003, U.S. commanders put the number of insurgents at 5,000. Earlier this month, Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, the director of the Iraqi intelligence service, said there are 200,000 insurgents, including at least 40,000 hard-core fighters. The rest, he said, are part-time fighters and supporters who provide food, shelter, funds and intelligence.

"Many Iraqis respect these gunmen because they are fighting the invaders," said Nabil Mohammed, a Baghdad University political science professor.

The insurgents "are getting smarter all the time. We've seen a lot of changes in their tactics that say, one, they're getting help from outside, and two, they're learning," said Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, 35, of Houston, a 16-year Army veteran, after spending an hour recently greeting Iraqis on a foot patrol through a Baghdad neighborhood

Also, here is a cheery story from Juan Cole:

Security is still so bad in Iraq that guerrillas were able to strike a national guard base near the airport with mortar fire Monday. As a result the air traffic controllers at Baghdad airport turned back both of that day's Royal Jordanian Airlines flights. RJA is the only commercial carrier that flies into Baghdad, aside from Iraqi Airlines themselves. Ironically, the inability of the planes to land stranded Iraqi Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan in Amman. When the Minister of Defense can't even fly to his own country because the area around the airport is in flames, you know that is a bad sign.

And then this from John Robb:

electricity on the national grid began plummeting from a peak of about 5,300 megawatts, or a million watts, in September. By November the number had fallen below the politically sensitive benchmark of4,500 megawatts, the level before American-led forces invaded Iraq, and bottomed out in mid-January at about 3,500 megawatts...  Alsammarae (the minister of electricity) said that, try as he might, he had not been able to stay above his rock-bottom goal of 4,000 megawatts as insurgents hit transmission lines and the fuel lines feeding the generating plants.

"Why should vote for this government when I can't see any of the basic services available?" said an angry Baghdad resident, Muhammed Ali.

Yep, things are going great.