Blistering Ralph Peters Column on "Our" Media

This is Tokyo Rose reporting.

Who with your girlfriend tonight, GI?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

...

Today, Iraqi soldiers, not militia thugs, patrol the lanes of Sadr City, where waste has replaced roadside bombs as the greatest danger to careless footsteps. US advisers and troops support the effort, but Iraq's government has taken another giant step forward in establishing law and order.

My fellow Americans, have you read or seen a single interview with any of the millions of Iraqis in Sadr City or Basra who are thrilled that the gangster militias are gone from their neighborhoods?

Didn't think so. The basic mission of the American media between now and November is to convince you, the voter, that Iraq's still a hopeless mess.

...

Developments just keep getting grimmer for the MoveOn.org fan base in the media. Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who had supported al Qaeda and homegrown insurgents, now support their government and welcome US troops. And, in southern Iraq, the Iranians lost their bid for control to Iraq's government.

Bury those stories on Page 36.

Our troops deserve better. The Iraqis deserve better. You deserve better. The forces of freedom are winning.

Here in the Land of the Free, of course, freedom of the press means the freedom to boycott good news from Iraq. But the truth does have a way of coming out.

The surge worked. Incontestably. Iraqis grew disenchanted with extremism. Our military performed magnificently. More and more Iraqis have stepped up to fight for their own country. The Iraqi economy's taking off. And, for all its faults, the Iraqi legislature has accomplished far more than our own lobbyist-run Congress over the last 18 months.

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

One of InstaPundit's readers made a brilliant point. During WWII, Japan's government and media always claimed Japan was winning every single battle. But careful listeners could divine the way the War in the Pacific was really going by noting the locations of each of these "victories" -- each of these "victories" seemed to be occurring closer and closer to the Japanese mainland.

In a near-exact reversal of that situation, the American media laments each and every American "defeat"... but careful readers will note that the "Zone of Quagmire" seems to be radiating farther and farther out from US power centers and closer and closer to the heart of Al Qaeda/insurgent/Sadrist control.

We began by losing in Fallujah so badly our troops now say there are weeks that go by without hearing a gun shot. It's quiet there now... Too quiet.

We then lost Baghdad catastrophically. You can tell we lost because there are so few reports of mortar attacks hitting the Green Zone. The enemy won there by moving further and further out from the city. You know -- surrounding us.

We then lost in Basra so dreadfully it apparently simply vanished from the map entirely, perhaps sucked into another dimension through an interplanar vortex.

Next up we lost in Sadr's last bastion of power -- the slum he's named for -- which you can see by fact that the Iraqi Army is now patrolling the streets and conducts house-to-house searches for weapons. But we lost, because two concessions were made to the Sadrists -- "light weapons" (pistols, rifles) could be kept, one per person, and no US troops would accompany the IA. That last point really stung us, because you know our boys are heartbroken that the IA gets the glamor duty of patrolling this slum. Glory denied; a brilliant psyops tactic to crush the spirits of our troops.

And now we're losing in Mosul, of course.

It's a funny thing -- we keep "losing" by successively moving into the enemy's next-most-dear bastion and taking it for our own.

Meanwhile, they "melt into the shadows," thereby defeating us, because of course they always wanted to be in the shadows anyhow; it was just their bad luck to have wound up in non-shadowy major urban centers. They were sort of trapped there, victims of circumstances, but always had their eyes set on that rich shadowy utopia out in the hinterlands and deserts.

In a way, we did them a favor by finally encouraging them to move to where their hearts had always been from the start. So neener-neener, we still lose.

In related news, Grand Moff Tarkin just called to say, "Hey, everything's going just great here! We're kicking the Rebels' asses, which point is ably demonstrated by the fact that they are now attacking our most prestigious battlestation. (Inaudible as he speaks to someone else; sounds like "Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their pants." Not really sure what that "pants" business is all about. Then he talks to me again.) So, yeah, I think we'll just finish mopping up here, easy-peasy lemon-squeezey. Say, if you could post that big busted Japanese model video again I'd be eternally--"

And then I lost the connection.

I hope he calls back. He seems like a good man. A good Republican man.

Thanks to Tall Dave for reminding me who'd made this point originally.

posted by Ace at 06:28 PM

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