The Surge: It's Effective... Almost... Too Effective

That's a bit of snark for Time Magazine, which headlined the story about the dramatic drop in violence in Baghdad thus:

It's Quiet In Baghdad. Too Quiet.

...and went on to lard up their article with a lot of quotes from troops about how scary the quiet was. Well, I'm sure they did find it a little unnerving, given their expectations of constant shooting and explosives. But Time Magazine didn't see fit to include a quote from one of the soldiers, which one of them certainly must have said: "Sure, it's kind of scary... but it's a lot less scary than being shot at every few hours."

Nuance. But nuance drained from the soldiers by Time's just-the-facts reportage/editing, to portray the soldiers as scared nearly senseless from the horrors they knew must be lurking in the dark corners.

Flopping Aces and Patrick Ruffini both note that the surge is actually working, and, hence, the media has very little interest in reporting from Baghdad lately.

The network reporters apparently weren't interested in venturing out into Iraqi neighborhoods now that it's actually safe to do so -- they favor the physical security of their Green Zone hotel rooms when the city is dangerous, and the intellectual security of remaining with their fellow reporters in those same hotel rooms when the city is much safer -- so the DoD knocked this report together themselves showing the surge in progress.

posted by Ace at 12:38 AM

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