It is a wonder that the Blogosphere hasn’t picked up on the latest media “Frame” on the war in Iraq – that Iraq is in purportedly in the middle of a civil war - and taken it apart like the propaganda it is.
What is going on in Iraq today is a losing terrorist campaign hyped by media spin as a civil war because the public no longer believes their prior “frame” that we were losing to the terrorists . This is easily proven with a simple comparison with Bosnia Herzegovina’s real civil war in the early-to-mid 1990s. Today there are 26 million Iraqis, according to the CIA’s Fact Book. There are four million Bosnians of whom about half (two million) are Muslim.
Bosnia Herzegovina’s Muslim population lost 200,000 dead in four years from 1992-1995’s civil war with the Serbs. That averages about 50,000 dead a year of two million Muslims, about one killed per forty people per year.
If the civil strife in post-liberation Iraq matched that of real civil war in Bosnia ten years ago, there would be 650,000 Iraqi fatalities per year – say 1800 dead Iraqis a day from “sectarian strife” to match the average death rate of Bosnia Herzegovina’s civil war.
We certainly want to calm Iraq down as much as possible but let's not get carried away with the panic attacks, eh?
Well, hey, I've done my part in the spirit of Trent Telenko's question. Starting with this post which coined the term "pressed up beyond all recognition." A variation in far politer terms of the military term FUBAR, of course.
So what we are seeing our press describe in Iraq can only be understood as a PUBAR.
Oh. And the question in my title is purely rhetorical. Every day that question is asked and answered by our esteemed members of the press corps. They may not be against us, but they sure aren't for us. And funny enoough, the simultaneously count on America to win so they can continue to pretend they are above mere national identity. What other country would tolerate such an attitude?
The members of the press corps--with few exceptions--are part of that noble self-elevated minority known as Journalistic-Americans who proudly value loyalty to their own over loyalty to their country.
