''raised concern Sunday that Iraq's worsening insurgency — until now targeting only coalition troops and Iraqis accused of U.S. collaboration — will spread to Westerners in general''

What absolute GARBAGE. The 'insurgency' is more organised, for sure, but still small. It does not have popular support. It has been targeting troops, Iraqis and westeners since Day 1. Thanks to the media, we only hear of its 'successes' and never of its numerous failures. The coalition are winning the peace handsomely and will continue to do so.

Here we go again. The media, desperate to increase falling sales, will run this story until we're blue in the face as proof of the disaster in Iraq.

Patience, everyone.

It's important to realise that the media have failed to cover any - at least, I can't find anything - of the day to day reconstruction efforts going on in Iraq. Their coverage of Iraq from the first has been a monument ot disastrous failure and a serious problem in general journalistic standards has been revealed ot the world. Don't get caught inot this crazy media 24 hour news cycle, where every little event that can be sensationalised is blown up into a full blown crisis.

Murder is tragic everywhere - the US and Iraq - and it's clear that Iraqis are still a scared bunch, which makes sense after years of dictatorship. The coalition needs to remove their central fear - that Hussein is still among them - and it will, with time. Remember it took Germand years to accept Hitler was gone and some still don't.

Not only patience, but people need to read DOWN to the bottom of stories, which is usually where the reality snaps in.

For example, a USA Today story today headlines with three US soldiers killed. Down it the bottom is this:

U.S. forces killed two insurgents who fired a rocket-propelled grenade as they drove toward an army outpost in the capital on Saturday.

• Insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a U.S. Army compound in the town of Abu Sada al-Sagra early Sunday, lightly injuring one soldier.

• The military announced the end of a seven-day sweep dubbed Sidewinder, in which 30 Iraqis were killed and 282 detained, while 28 U.S. soldiers were wounded. The military said it confiscated ammunition stocks and hundreds of weapons.

In other words, in one week we killed 32 bad guys.

I'd like to see a better than 3-to-1 kill ratio, and we'll get to that, but there is no way this is succeeding.

It's a mind game and the media plays right into it.

But the good news is that the US is the best army in the world when it comes to changing tactics...and we will. And Jesus, let's get the power on. Most of the complaints are about that one issue. C'mon guys...

BTW: anyone have any idea why we haven't declared martial law in the worst cities? Seems like that's a given but I've read nothing so far. If you're out at night, you're dead. Period.

I'll say it again.. we cannot send Arnold, Harrison Ford, George Clooney, Bruce Willis, Superman, etc., over to Iraq and change things immediately. We Americans are a little bit too impatient. We have to rebuild an infrastructue that was in disarray and disrepair for many years. This will take time. Everyone needs to be patient. A baseball game is nine innings and, quite frankly, we are still in the top of the first.

As I get older I do realize one thing. While I once respected the overall job that repoters in general did, I no longer do. Like the rest of us, reporters should act in a professional manner and report the facts without embellishmenet and exageration. Unfortunately, I see none of that anymore. Funnier yet is the fact that these idiots cannot even report the news factually but then they take it upon themselves to provide critique and opinion. Many reporters have no college education and/or a PH.D in international affairs and yet they act if they are experts. And the majority of newscasters that make it to the top are only there because of their good looks and the quality of their speaking voice. Nothing more.

We have problems in this world, serious ones that have been neglected for far too long. Quite frankly, I am not interested in appeasing all the fools in the world, I do not care what the germans may think of us, etc. I am not interested in Hillary's opinion of anything. Sadly, we let things get outta hand by trying to appease others.

Atomicdog - I at one time thought that the Kryponitecollar was affecting your processes. I may have erred... Good news does not sell. Period. Bad news keeps the reporters and editors and political commentators slappin' words together, and payin' rent. We get the benefit of givin' the uninformed some alternate views to consider, instead of having to depend on the portside pukers for honest reporting and commenting. Do not forget. You can please only some of the people some of the time.

Dave these time zones , and a full working day can really put one behind the curve of play. I left a small thought on this on the Baghdad Back to the Stone Age, thread . Probably 12 hours after everyone else left it.

If the media won't spread the good news perhaps our joint governments should put more effort into neutralising the endless diet of "Quagmire...doom...despair".Rather than constantly react to the doomsayers we should get proactive and start recognising the good work that is being done all over Iraq, despite the best efforts of certain mindless thugs both behind and in front of the cameras.

On Fox this morning they said that the 'terrorists' in Iraq, that are causing the process of restoring electricity to go slower, are even crawling down in manholes and cutting wires.

Ubique, Jeff B - I have an idea. It may not be new. It may not even be news.

Before the war, the UN Inspectors and News Media folks had 'minders'. Couldn't we like, institute a 'minders' program of our own? Just plain ol' Iraqi citizens who could like, do the ride-along thingy with Iraqi police and Coalition troops? Someone who could provide the Iraqi citizenry with an Iraqi perspective? Couldn't we like, maybe even pay these folks to do that? Curious.

I'll say it again, Dave.
Good ideas almost never fail to get lost in bureaucratic channels. Someone who's never quite made it out from behind a desk always seems to make the call that should have been made by someone on the business end, while dismissing that person as not having "the big picture".
I wonder if Alan and Michele would be angry re discriminatory statements due to my fanatical prejudice against career bureaucrats. If I ever started my own skinhead style movement, perish the thought, those parasites would be the targets. Our goal would be to terrorize 'em all out of their jobs and replace them with lean, mean decision makin' machines(people with front lines experience who can think on their feet and make fast, practical decisions and have them implemented without having to first establish an ad hoc committee).

I have no real comment except my heart aches. That is what the media does, it does not tell you about the 500 cars that made it thru the intersection, it tells you about the one that didn't. How is fox handling this?

Seth,
I understand - but, I don't. A local shopkeeper who has locals coming to visit him every day, who requires electricity to keep his shop open, ought to be able to give up the shop (lack of electricity perhaps?) for a day, for a pile of Dinars, to ride along on a patrol for instance, just like civvies do in this country. Someone who can go back to his shop tomorrow and let his customers know what he discovered about the power problems, and who's really causing them. Is that way much to ask from our leadership? It doesn't make a lot of sense to expect Joe Iraqi to comprehend what's really happening based on a pre-war conception that he was recieving from Baghdad Bob. I can't see how some Dinars spent on a program like this, even if it was just limited to the poorer neighborhoods of Baghdad, couldn't help...

That's what I mean, Dave. A practical and inexpensive solution.
But that's in the purview of aforementioned civilian bureaucrats, and they never, ever go with a timely, logical solution. The more they complicate an issue, the more bureaucracy is needed. It perpetuates their work.
Look at lawyers. Lawmakers are lawyers. Haven't you noticed a trend for many lawmakers to word their product so that you need a lawyer to interpret it? It's the same thing, basically. There are a lot of people around who care more about generating work for themselves and their colleagues than they do about the public good.
Rule of thumb: Make it complicated, it's better for business(their business).

Seth said, "people with front lines experience who can think on their feet and make fast, practical decisions and have them implemented without having to first establish an ad hoc committee)."

Like Ross Perot said, "If you see a snake, kill it. Don't form a committee on snakes."

Seth,
I wonder if Bremer has an email address?

As I've said many times. Good thorough communication with the Iraqi people is a must. What ever it takes. Couldn't some of the reporters that supposedly hear these people bitching about the US troops, give them a hint of what is really going on?? Yeah, right. :)

I sure hate to write this, but it sure seems that someone such as Saddam is about the only thing that works in Iraq. Maybe that is what they deserve.

I'm tired of hearing how the US is taking their oil and giving them nothing. Not much oil is getting out - most of that is smuggled away from the local population.

Let the butchers at each other for a year or two.

Regards

LOL.
Yep, Jeff(welcome back, BTW), and that's the kind of logic we need in Iraq right now, because we really don't have the luxury of waiting for a bunch of fat, overpaid walking procrastination machines to take weeks to decide who gets the key to the third floor men's room while people are dying out there.

Dave, if I were Bremer, my email address would be unlisted. Can you imagine the stuff he would get? A few hundred "Infidel, go home" messages from Sodomites and a lot of lambasting from people like me who harbor an instinctive hatred for overstuffed bureaucracies. He'd also get a lot of good advice, which he'd have to reject on GP.

U.S. forces in Iraq have become a new magnet for regional terrorist activity. They assume this demonstrates the foolishness of President Bush's decision to invade.
It more likely demonstrates the opposite. While engaged in the very difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq -- the first democracy, should it succeed, in the entire history of the Arabs -- President Bush has also, quite consciously, created a new playground for the enemy, away from Israel, and even farther away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this lower ground, he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.

This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt from the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday, when he was quizzed about the "growing threat to U.S. forces" on the ground in Iraq. It should have been obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers take casualties. What the media, and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp, is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenceless civilians, both in Iraq and at large. The sore thumb of the U.S. occupation -- and it is a sore thumb equally to Baathists and Islamists, compelling their response -- is not a mistake. It is carefully hung flypaper.

from:
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Jul03/index150.shtml#top

Seth,
All righty then - How about this? - The 6th degree of separation thingy. Someone who knows someone who knows someone. Here we are, coming up with ideas just by discussing and arguing among ourselves, and it isn't doing a whole fat lot of good if the message isn't getting through. It has to start somewhere! I'm getting real tired of flappin' lips on the subject, when we're not doing anything to correct what the entire globe seems to percieve as unresolved issues! The greatest technology since sliced bread, and we can't communicate... Go figure.

read that whole article, it's interesting

Bubba,

DYNOMITE! Excellent read. How long do we have to wait for the maggots to hatch out?

Excellent article.
David Warren needs to train the rest of the journalists as a prerequisite to giving them passports.

It was in a canadian paper. Ottawa Citizen

The forces in Iraq are deliberately acting like flypaper for terrorists, draining them from the whole region and bringing them right where there happen to be lots of firepower and the excuse to use it.
Sounds good to me

The article I found was titled "pacifying Iraq."