TOO LABILE TO LEAD:

A "Different Iraq," the First Debate, and Why Kerry Is Scary (Orson Scott Card, October 3, 2004, The Rhinoceros Times)

Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s, column in the Monday News & Record sneeringly asserted that President Bush must know about a "different Iraq" from the one we ordinary citizens know about.

Well, duh.

What President Bush knows about Iraq comes from the reports of sober professionals, who have the perspective of what's happening in the whole country.

These are people who face the casualty reports, who have to drive in convoys or heavily armored vehicles called "rhinos" to get into and out of the green zone; who go to sleep to the sound of mortar fire almost every night. They are not wearing rose-colored glasses.

A friend of mine who is in Baghdad right now agrees that yes, the insurgents and terrorists are redoubling their efforts -- but that doesn't mean we're losing.

"These people are getting desperate," he says, "because the latest [poll] numbers show that the people are turning against the insurgents, especially as the reconstruction projects have increased significantly."

Politicians who have a vested interest in making the war look like a failure refuse to accept the fact that the vast majority of the Iraqi people recognize (a) that life is better now than it was before we came, (b) that the present government offers their best chance for freedom and democracy and stability, and (c) the insurgents and terrorists are their enemies, not just our enemies.

Of course the polls all say that Iraqis want us to go. Why in the world would they want anything else? Polls in Germany and Japan after World War II would have shown that they wanted U.S. troops out of there ... unless the alternative was Soviet troops ... or chaos.

Iraqis are volunteering for the police and military in large numbers. Again, cynical American politicians claim that this is because they are starving and need the jobs. But that's absurd.

These are patriotic Iraqis who recognize that the way to get full independence is to have an effective military and police force that can keep these insurgents from creating chaos or, even worse, becoming the new dictators of Iraq.

Most of Iraq is at peace. In most areas, the citizens report suspicious activity and do not cooperate with terrorists. For one thing, they've caught on that it's their children who get blown up by terrorist bombs. For another, they recognize that the terrorists are either foreigners who don't care diddly about the Iraqi people, or insurgents from the Sunni triangle, whose desire is to impose their rule on the non-Sunni/non-Arab majority.

Our media naturally cover the explosions and attacks and American deaths. This is not a media conspiracy, it's in the nature of the beast -- reporters go where the action is.

But it can give a very false impression, just as the media did in the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Americans got the impression that we were losing the war. The American public despaired. Yet we won that battle.

The thing to remember is that the enemy can pick when and where to attack our forces. They can concentrate their efforts on points of weakness (and there are always points of relative weakness). So for a moment, they seem to prevail -- the inflict casualties, they may even seize territory.

Think, for instance, of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. It was obvious to everyone that Germany was losing the war -- even to the Germans! But that didn't prevent them from concentrating their forces for one last-ditch offensive against the western allies.

They pushed us back. We "lost" the first days and weeks of that battle. And many American soldiers died or were captured.

But the story didn't end there. What mattered was that we responded, we recovered, and we won the battle -- and the war.

Bad enough that Mr. Kerry is a Reactionary, even worse is that he reacts reflexively to every bit of news that comes along.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2004 2:44 PM