The latest, based on the latest WikiLeaks, is that our government lied about sectarian violence in 2006:
In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise.
Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself and many of my fellow journalists in Baghdad were covering in the aftermath of a fateful February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
Certainly, some Iraqis were trying to incite civil war, Rumsfeld acknowledged. But Iraq's own security forces had "taken the lead in controlling the situation," he insisted, and quick action by the Shiite-led government had "a calming effect."
Rumsfeld also made clear at the time that U.S. officials were fighting another kind of war over Iraq -- the battle for U.S. opinion. The "misreporting" on the death toll was driving down U.S. support for the war, the defense secretary complained.
Four years on, however, WikiLeaks' release of contemporary troop logs raises serious questions about who, exactly, was doing the lying.
One of the few absolute revelations from the Wikileaks documents is the extent to which Rumsfeld, then-U.S. commander Gen. George Casey, and others had access to ample information from unimpeachable sources -- their own troops on the ground in Iraq -- regarding how badly events had turned in Iraq by 2006, but nonetheless denied a surge in killing to reporters and the U.S. public.
This is absolute drivel. I looked for the transcript on the DOD site, but it is no longer there. I did find a Washington Post article on the press conference, and I'd think that it would have mentioned the Secretary of Defense calling reporters "liars." Nor does it quote Rumsfeld as calling Iraq "peaceful"--which I seriously doubt he did given that he was discussing the level of violence in Iraq after the bombing. And really, who can now deny that the press generally exaggerated civilian casualties in Iraq during the war?
But did the bombing at the end of February unleash a civil war? While the recent article says there may have been 2,500 casualties in February 2006, Icasualties paints a different picture, where the first number is Iraqi security forces casualties and the second civilian casualties:
Dec-06: 123; 1629
Nov-06: 123; 1741
Oct-06: 224; 1315
Sep-06: 150; 3389
Aug-06: 233; 2733
Jul-06: 217; 1063
Jun-06: 132; 738
May-06: 150; 969
Apr-06: 201; 808
Mar-06: 191; 901
Feb-06: 158; 688
Jan-06: 189; 590
Remember, speaking of the surge of violence in 2006 neglects that 2006 was twelve months long. The violence in the fall that shaped our elections that November were not the same as the first half of the year, despite the February Golden Mosque bombing. Even if casualties were underreported in Iraq (and even WikiLeaks doesn't show that), the trend is clear.
In the aftermath of the Samarra bombing, I braced myself for the Shias to finally start retaliating against the Sunnis after years of relative restraint in the face of horrendous crimes by the Baathists and their al Qaeda allies directed at Shias. The press certainly said it was happening. But the numbers said otherwise initially, even if journalists reported every death through the lens of "civil war" that they put on.
The civilian casualties simply weren't that different from January to June, averaging 782 per month in that period, despite the February start of the supposed civil war. Only in July did the numbers of dead break three digits, and it is really the period from August to December, with 1,978 civilian casualties per month, that shapes our popular view of the entire year. And that neglects to consider that much of the violence was a result of the efforts of outsiders (al Qaeda and radical Sunni backers abroad on one side and Iran on the other) to ramp up the violence inside Iraq. Indeed, our enemies continued to try to spark a civil war even as our surge kicked into high gear in summer 2007.
This latest WikiLeaks dump is not proof of the Bush administration or our military lying. I won't go so far as to say it reflects lying by the anti-war journalists who continue to call administration statements from March 2006 "lies." It is worse, it reflects that the reporters still don't really understand war, the fog of war, or that splendid "context" that they insist their journalism degrees allow them to provide to the unwashed masses who read their reports.
Actually, what is really amazing is the determination of war opponents to continue the debate that will not end of whether we should overthrow the Saddam regime. This article isn't about enlightening us or learning, it is about continuing the war debate--even after we've won the war--that the war was a mistake. That's the obvious conclusion, anyway.
UPDATE: This post is long enough, but it is a good place to mention that every once in a while you read something that tries to paint George W. Bush as determined to lie us into war with Iraq by pointing out that he looked at options to destroy or overthrow Saddam's regime even before 9/11. Given that we were in weekly conflict with Iraq enforcing no-fly zones and that it was our official policy to change the regime in Iraq, based on legislation signed by President Clinton, this sort of conspiracy thinking just annoys me to no end.
