More bad news in Iraq. May marks the grimmest month in terms of numbers since MSM began covering the war:

Yesterday ended the month with the fewest Coalition casualties since nearly the beginning of the war in Iraq. There were only about 20 combat-related deaths during the entire month of May. Hopefully portending even better things to come, only about five of those deaths occurred during the final two weeks of the month.

It isn’t about body counts, however, since one way to ensure a low casualty rate is to sequester American forces on forward operating bases. What makes the statistic even more impressive is that the low death total came even as the operational tempo was as busy as ever.

The lack of coverage on such numbers has some experts questioning the objectivity of MSM editors. Some even suggesting that perhaps their coverage has been biased.

Found this little nugget and thought it was funny.

Yea, so it’s been a little over a week since my last post, partly due to a crazy patrol schedule and partly due to a lack of anything to write about. I’m amazed at how bored I actually am, nothing is going on at all; I’m almost willing to bet that I could go running through my platoon AO without gear or my weapon and I’d be completely untouched.

I’m not the only one feeling the boredom, on one of our patrols we paid 4 donkey cart drivers to race, the stipulation, one soldier on the back of each donkey cart. My donkey lost, it tried to kick it’s driver.

Admittedly this opinion piece is bias but I think it does a fine job of showing just how miserable news coverage of this war has been.

To be fair to the quit-Iraq-and-save-the-terrorists media, they have covered a few recent stories from Iraq:

* When a rogue US soldier used a Koran for target practice, journalists pulled out all the stops to turn it into “Abu Ghraib, The Sequel.”

Unforgivably, the Army handled the situation well. The “atrocity” didn’t get the traction the whorespondents hoped for.

* When a battered, bleeding al Qaeda managed to set off a few bombs targeting Sunni Arabs who’d turned against terror, that, too, received delighted media play.

* As long as Baghdad-based journalists could hope that the joint US-Iraqi move into Sadr City would end disastrously, we were treated to a brief flurry of headlines.

* A few weeks back, we heard about another Iraqi company - 100 or so men - who declined to fight. The story was just delicious, as far as the media were concerned.

Then tragedy struck: As in Basra the month before, absent-without-leave (and hiding in Iran) Muqtada al Sadr quit under pressure from Iraqi and US troops. The missile and mortar attacks on the Green Zone stopped. There’s peace in the streets.

He goes on to say:

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.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People’s Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Emphasis is mine.

Over at Jawa Report, a post states:

The post-invasion period subjected Iraqis to the tyranny of chaos. The vacuum left by the Baathist police state was filled by yet another tyranny: the tyranny of Sunni Islamists, like al Qaeda; and the tyranny of Shia Islamists, like those following Muqtada al Sadr. This is when the Second Iraq War started.

The first war was against Iraq, a nation-state. The second war is against terrorists and Islamist rebels.

I honestly believe part of the reason the administration decided to go into Iraq was to pick a fight with Islamic fundamentalists. Yes, the primary reason was weapons of mass destruction but i’m sure another reason way to bring the fight to the fantastics. In this capacity the strategy was unequivocal success particularly when you consider how soundly we routed Al Qaeda in Iraq.

I’m confused. I was assured that invading Iraq would only create more terrorists.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.

Let me get this straight. So an individual may claim to support an ideology but then when they are forced to live in that ideology withdraw their support. You don’t say. Really? Average people don’t like to live under austere religious conditions. Having to live in those conditions makes them antipathetic towards such fundamentalism.

And here I figured it would make them more fanatical. More like to join the ranks of Al Qaeda. Turns out freedom is the antidote to fanaticism. Well shucks. Who knew? Technically the conservatives did, but people on the left might have a hard time fessing up to that.

In Iraq, the federal army is pushing out the Mahdi Army which is the the Militia of al-Sadr.

The good news is, Iraqi forces are heavily engaged with the Mahdi Army with U.S. troops in a supporting role, all over the place. The weird part is, al-Maliki has supposedly taken a lead role in directing operations against his erstwhile bedfellow al-Sadr. The key question, in all matters requiring an element of trust in either al-Maliki or al-Sadr, is which one can you throw farther? The Sadrists are claiming it’s all political, to cut them out of provinicial elections, and if al-Maliki’s that interested, there’s got to be a sleazy political angle to it. On the other hand, if it in fact has the effect of ending Shiite infighting and lawlessness, and edges out Iran, then there is a distinctly unsleazy strategic angle to it. Al-Maliki has given the Mahdi Army 72 hours to lay down their weapons. Disarming illegal militias is a legitimate act of government.

For those of you less than enthralled with defining the state as the entity with a monopoly on coercion I ask what purpose does the Iraq federal goverment serve in disbanding this militia? Why should the federal state force a local armed force to put down their weapons and obey the state?

Just to head off the obvious criticism, the argument is that the essential definition of the state is it’s monopoly on coercion. Its clear that the state can be defined in many different ways, but if you strip away all the properties of the state which property do you find present in every state? Most certainly the common property that connects states together is their monopoly on coercion.

Delicious Snacks Distract Congressmen From Horrors Of War

Christopher Hitchens, an actual liberal, writes about why the Iraq war was a good thing.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn’t condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.

…

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

This piece does a fine job of capturing my sentiment towards the news media’s current attitude toward covering the Iraq war.

Guitar Heroes chronicles the bravery of a group of American soldiers, Kiowa helicopter pilots that often engage terrorist cells at near rooftop level, at ranges so close that pilots engage the insurgents below them with rifles instead of rockets. You won’t read many stories such as these in the New York Times or USA Today. More than willing to publish one story after another alleging how our military and our soldiers are being broken, these national media outlets seem loath to print the stories of heroism and success being written by American and Iraqi patriots.

These same media organizations devoted thousands of column inches to an anti-war radical in August of 2005 for the simple act of sitting on a ditchbank in Crawford, Texas to protest the war. The coverage these news organizations afforded Cindy Sheehan has rarely been afforded supporters of the war, even those that have a far more informed firsthand opinion that most anti-war activists lack.

Cindy Sheenhan get hours and hours and columns and columns of coverage but the positive things about the war scarcely sees the front page. History will look very poorly on the way news organization covered this war. Very poorly.

This is going to leave a mark.

Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an “emboldenment” effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

Science shows that democrats are bad for the war in Iraq. Given that its science, and therefore true, it seems wise to implement federal regulation censoring voices critical of the war. Its like global warming. If science shows its true, then its okay to infringe on people’s rights.

Let the hell storm begin.