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November 29, 2005

The "good news" from Iraq isn't why we're there.

With typical fingerpointing gusto, my friends on the rightwing side of the aisle are pointing to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor that they think definitively proves that the media isn't telling the whole story of Iraq:

Yet the Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies.

Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity - if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops' individual experiences.

It's very possible that the media isn't reporting much of the good news from Iraq: new schools, new hospitals, infrastructure improvements, etc. Iraq is a very dangerous place. Kidnappings and bombings make the region difficult to yield a comprehensive picture of everything that's going on.

However, I believe that even if the media was reporting the vast majority of the "good things" happening in Iraq, public support would still be eroding quickly.

We were told that we had to invade Iraq because they were going to use weapons of mass destruction against us on our soil. We couldn't wait to invade because if we did...it would put our nation at real physical risk. This information turned out to be spectacularly false. Had the public been told that we were going to invade Iraq to save the Iraqis from Hussein and then rebuild their country to bring democracy...it's unlikely there would have been much public support.

Even with all of these good deeds our soldier are doing in the name of bringing democracy and helping the Iraqis, millions of them believe that suicide attacks against US and British soldiers are justified. Even more alarming, up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve their security.

The Iraqis have to be seeing these good things we're doing. The experiences of these marines who've testified to these positives can't be one sided. Even with those good works factored in, the Iraqis pretty clearly believe we're doing much more harm than good.

Perhaps the cognitive dissonance of good vs bad in Iraq isn't on the part of the media, as my rightwing friends (and some soldiers) would have us believe. Perhaps the dissonance is on the part of the soldier who are heavily weighting the positives they're able to do against the many negatives seen by the Iraqis...and by the American people.

Or maybe things like trophy videos showing private security contractors randomly shooting Iraqi civilians so clouds the issue that Iraqis can't see the positives. Maybe for them, knowing that the US and Great Britain are responsible for the deaths of so many innocents...it really doesn't matter.

Posted by Carla at November 29, 2005 06:53 AM