There is an interesting article today at NewsBusters about two “journalists” attempting to justify this discrepancy in reporting.

This question was posed to Robin Wright: “Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?”

Not necessarily. The fact is we’re at the beginning of a trend — and it’s not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.

There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal — from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn’t have much of a capability in the south.

So the numbers themselves are tricky.

Don’t want to jump the gun, huh? Right. What about an increase in casualties?

KURTZ: But let’s say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that’s certainly — that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?

We’ve had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this.

So, casualties going up is “news”, but casualties going down is something to be skeptical about. It’s almost as if they want us to lose.

As always, read the whole article.

The major problem in Iraq is back in the United States. There, many politicians either don’t bother, or don’t want to believe, what is actually happening, and has happened, in Iraq. In a way, that makes sense. Because what is going on in Iraq is so totally alien to the experience of American politicians. Moreover, many Americans take a purely partisan, party line, attitude towards Iraq. So logic and fact has nothing to do with their assessments of the situation.

More…

Now, this is the critical thing that many Americans don’t understand, or even know. When Saddam was deposed in 2003, most (well, many) Sunni Arabs believed they would only be out of power temporarily. This sort of thing you can pick up on the Internet (OK, mostly on Arab language message boards, but it’s out there). Saddam’s followers (the Baath Party) and al Qaeda believed a few years of terror would subdue the Shia, scare away the Americans, and the Sunni Arabs would return to their natural state as the rulers of Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

I would just like to add: Most of the opposition I’ve seen to the war lies purely along partisan lines. The Left hates George Bush with such a passion that anything he does is Automatically and Obviously Bad and Evil. Their hatred of the man makes them utterly incapable of rational thought when it comes to his policies. This is incredibly harmful to the country.

I know of what I speak because I saw my side of the aisle do the exact same thing to President Clinton. Both instances rose well beyond mere partisanship to the point of derangement.

Update: This lead at the Washington Times illustrates my point nicely:

Dems already dismissing Iraq war report

By S.A. Miller
September 6, 2007

Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus’ credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can’t be trusted.

If there’s good news coming out of Iraq, the Democrats aren’t interested in hearing it. It might make the President look good. They would prefer defeat and national disaster just so they can tear down the President they loathe.

Fucking traitors.

Or, maybe it’s because of the stunning incompetence of the Republican Party. With a Republican Congress and Republican Presidency, there was an opportunity for great things (or, at least things that didn’t suck as badly as Democratic things). Instead, we got a bunch of stupidity. They passed on many opportunities to do something constructive, like fix Social Security, build a damned wall against Mexico, or undo some the damage of the Clinton years. They did none of those things. But you could definitely count on them to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, like between a doctor and her patient’s uterus. And they got more excited about some brain-dead woman in Florida than about making sure I’m not throwing my salary away on social services that won’t be there when I retire.

The one truly constructive thing they did was allow the moronic “assault weapons” ban to expire. Of course, that accomplishment simply required them to do nothing.

And what about fiscal discipline? In 1994, the Republicans replaced a thoroughly corrupted Democratic Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And in 2006… the Democrats replaced a thoroughly corrupted Republican Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And, what do I expect this newfangled Democratic Congress to do? Why, piss money away to their cronies and not give a flying fuck about the rest of us! New boss, same as the old boss. I think it’s time to explore term limits.

When the Republicans weren’t doing stupid things, they allowed the Democrats to paint them as doing stupid things. “Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs!” is the classic example here. “Bush Lied” is itself the big lie. The entire world agreed that Iraq was a WMD threat before the war. Now that the war has gone south (thanks largely to the Iraqis themselves), many people are simply practicing selective memory. The problem here is that the Republicans have not pushed back against this disinformation. They’ve sat on their asses and allowed the Left’s “Bush Lied” meme to become accepted in political discourse. Stupid!

As it turns out, Saddam did have WMDs, just not in the amounts the world had feared. People can be forgiven for missing all the press coverage of chemical munitions, chlorine bombs, and nuclear technical documents, since, um, the press hasn’t been covering it (that goes against the “Bush Lied” meme, after all). Essentially, Saddam was bluffing about the size of his WMD capability, and he didn’t expect the United States to call his bluff. After all, we hadn’t called the bluff in the Clinton years.

As for the war itself, “mismanaged” seems to be a good euphemism. General Petraeus seems to be going in the right direction with classic counter-insurgency tactics, if reports from embedded milbloggers are any indication. Too bad we didn’t do that in 2004. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

As for the Muslims — especially the Arab Muslims — all I can say is that’s a pretty fucked up religion. Most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, are intrinsically messed up anyhow, but Islam takes the cake — hence its elevation to “fucked up”. And I’m not going to qualify or justify that statement; the Muslims do that themselves. There is a significant number of complete whackos in that faith, and the rest of them are simply enablers that do nothing to contain their whacko brethren. Westerners who still buy into the “Religion of peace” baloney after all the bloodshed perpetrated by Muslims all the way back to Muhammad are just willfully ignorant.

Maybe there’s still hope for those people. The kinder side of me still holds out hope. Our efforts to build a democratic Iraq are ultimately based upon that hope. But many days I have my doubts.

So it’s safe to say that I feel let-down. I’ve been let down by a Republican Congress that stank as badly as the Democrats they replaced. I’ve been let down by a bunch of Shiites that are more interested in settling scores than building a country.

And I’ve been thoroughly embarrassed by George W Bush, whom I confidently voted for, twice. It’s not that he’s an idiot. It’s that he’s stubborn and a very poor communicator, which together are essentially fatal bugs. I guess that when the Queen of England (or Helen Mirren, anyhow) declares that she “was a mechanic during the ‘war’”, she was referring to the American Revolutionary War. I wish John McCain had won the 2000 primaries. Or Joe Lieberman, for that matter.

I fully expect the new Democratic Congress to stink, and I also give the Democrats about a 70% chance of winning the White House in 2008. Trying to make things somewhat better by debating politics right now is somewhat akin to standing on the beach and commanding the tide not to come in — I expect to get all wet. And since no one else reads this blog anyhow, I expect it to be all wet on an empty beach.

In any case, all of the bloggers in my blogroll are better political writers than I am. Go read.

Yet even stipulating–which I do only for the sake of argument–that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was “a slam dunk.” This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with “high confidence” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.”

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and–yes–France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix–who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past–lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

More…

But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Mr. Clinton’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

And more…

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force–if necessary–to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

Byrd: “The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.”

Read the whole thing.

The “Bush lied” meme has become quite entrenched in anti-war thinking. However, this article quite convincingly shows that “Bush lied” is itself the great lie.

Our basic mistake was to assume that political factions in Iraq were essentially the same as political factions at home: (mostly) good people who just have differing opinions. We assumed that all factions in Iraq would put aside their own interests and hatreds and work together to build a new Iraq, if only given the chance.

Indeed there are good people in Iraq. Most of them are good. But there are also evil thugs who would love nothing more than to be the next Saddam. Assuming that the thugs could be reformed by participation in democracy was our single biggest mistake of the occupation. Frankly, it’s a mistake from which we may not be able to recover.

It isn’t politically correct to recognize thugs for what they are: Evil and Unreformable. Yet, the mess we find ourselves in clearly demonstrates that thugs cannot be expected to reform. Of course, facing that fact is also not politically correct.

The only way out of this mess that I see is highly politically incorrect: the thugs need killin’. I humbly propose the following solutions:

• Kill al-Sadr. I don’t give a shit whether he’s part of the government or not.
• Then kill any other government minister who doesn’t disband their personal militias immediately.
• Shoot any militiaman on sight, regardless of affiliation.
• Summarily execute any unauthorized person caught wearing an Iraqi police or army uniform. No arrest. No trial.
• Summarily execute any policeman or soldier found to be affiliated with insurgents or militias.
• Flatten any city that rises in rebellion. Do not tolerate another Fallujah.
• Immediately retake any city that falls to a militia — especially in the southern part of the country.

Brutal and nasty? Yes. A violation of the Iraqi government’s sovereignty? Yup. Overreaction? No, because the current “feel good”, politically correct approach sure as hell hasn’t worked.

So, in a way, I have to agree with the leftists: the occupation has been totally fucked up. But invading was still the right decision.

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Despite the expected anti-Bush spin, this pretty much destroys the “Bush Lied” meme, doesn’t it?

It’s pretty obvious that if Saddam had been left alone, the sanctions and controls imposed on him after the Gulf War would have come to an end. (They were already falling apart by 2003, thanks in no small part to certain European powers.) Once sanctions were gone, he would then have been free to restart his weapons programs — or sell his knowledge to interested third parties, such as Al-Qaida.

The grizzled leader of our heroes, Sgt. ‘Scream’, complains that they are stuck there holding the cordon so some stupid general 75 miles away can look good on TV. And so the soldiers hunker down for a 36 hour siege while the brass in Baghdad cow-tow to the Mainstream Media and negotiate with the terrorists.

In the real war, the commanders on the ground would have returned fire and shot the building full of holes before anyone watching Al Jazeera on the satellite in Baghdad could figure out what was going on.

In the real war, as evidenced by Fallujah and other cities, the mosque would have been shot up and probably destroyed. The following day, the media would be grilling the generals about how they killed an Al Jazeera reporter and destroyed a mosque. The media would complain loudly, the Arab media would scream bloody murder and the anti-war left would demand that Sgt. ‘Scream’ and the fire team be investigated for war crimes because they killed terrorists who were offering to surrender.

That is what would happen in the real war.

But ‘Over There’ is a Hollywood production being filmed in the Mojave Desert and in drama, and the heroes have to be right and vindicated. But showing the reality war and how the media operates in war is not what Hollywood wants.

Why am I not surprised? Hollywood not only gets it wrong, they get it wrong intentionally. Weasels.

About this time, three armored Hummers that formed the MP Squad under call sign Raven 42, 617th MP Co, Kentucky National Guard, assigned to the 503rd MP Bn (Fort Bragg), 18th MP Bde, arrived on the scene like the cavalry. The squad had been shadowing the convoy from a distance behind the last vehicle, and when the convoy trucks stopped and became backed up from the initial attack, the squad sped up, paralleled the convoy up the shoulder of the road, and moved to the sound of gunfire.

They arrived on the scene just as a squad of about ten enemy had moved forward across the farmer’s field and were about 20 meters from the road. The MP squad opened fire with .50 cal machineguns and Mk19 grenade launchers and drove across the front of the enemy’s kill zone, between the enemy and the trucks, drawing fire off of the tractor trailers.

[...]

Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rds of PK ammo.

[...] Of the 7 members of Raven 42 who walked away, two are Caucasian Women, the rest men-one is Mexican-American, the medic is African-American, and the other two are Caucasian-the great American melting pot.

These fine men and women make me so proud to be an American. Way to go!

Left-wing journalist Giuliana Sgrena claimed American soldiers gave no warning before they opened fire and said Sunday she could not rule out that U.S. forces intentionally shot at the car carrying her to the Baghdad airport, wounding her and killing the Italian agent who had just won her freedom after a month in captivity.

Tell me: Would someone who had just spent a month in captivity, and riding in the back seat, be paying any attention to whatever the hell her driver was doing?

Besides, I trust the word of an American soldier over that of an anti-war, Communist ding-bat “journalist” any day.