Instapundit has a round-up on media coverage of the operation in Basra. Ed Morrissey indicts the media:
Did our media give anyone this context? No. They reported it as some kind of spontaneous eruption of rebellion without noting at all that a nation can hardly be considered sovereign while its own security forces cannot enter a large swath of its own territory. And in the usual defeatist tone, they reported that our mission in Iraq had failed without waiting to see what the outcome of the battle would be.
But Ed Cone disagrees, pointing to two stories that did give context. Cone is partly right; the article I read at the Washington Post did give some context (can’t find it now, sorry), and didn’t present it as spontaneous rebellion. However, I think that Morrissey is more right than wrong.
The media has utterly failed to educate the public on the state of the war, preferring to focus on its “grim milestones.” (I suppose it’s more efficient their way: they’ve been able to represent the entire war in 12 bits.) To anyone who is informed on the war, it has been perfectly obvious that this had to happen eventually. Morrissey saves me the trouble of explaining why:
The British left a power vacuum behind in the south that the Baghdad government could not fill at the time, and Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s Badr Brigades filled it instead. They have fought each other and some smaller Shi’ite groups for control of the streets ever since 2005. . . The Iraqi government had no choice but to challenge the militias for control of Basra and the surrounding areas, but they waited until the Iraqi Army had enough strength to succeed.
This explanation rates in complexity somewhere between the domino theory and “Berlin is that way” so the media ought to have been able to handle it.
UPDATE: Day by day weighs in.
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