Reporting the story’s end … but when?

Thursday, July 2, 2009

TV SETS THROUGHOUT the country relay images of fireworks and marching bands, in celebration of a national holiday. No, not Independence Day in the US, but the new Sovereignty Day (June 30th, that is) in Iraq.

There’s been some uneasy doubt, though, in the media of both countries over how much joyousness (as photographed above in the city of Ramadi) to buy into with this calendar milestone, when the American military withdrew its visible presence from major Iraqi population centers.

 

From now on, in theory, Iraqi forces handle their nation’s security themselves, relying on the back-up of US troops only in situations where (in the slightly quaint usage of one American reporter) they have “to dial 911”.

 

What is emerging is one of those communications divides that will at times characterize an overarching national and international truth – but one which for reasons of politics is hard to talk about.

 

Let’s call it the distinction between reciting facts and reporting reality.

 

There are facts. Yes, US troops have withdrawn to out-of-town base-camps. Ah, and yes, there do remain almost 130,000 US troops in the country we invaded six and one quarter years ago. It may seem like the “beginning of the end”, a phrase much used by the most optimistic among stop-the-war enthusiasts … but how long is “the end”?

 

The answer to that question is the largely unspoken reality that’s less often being tackled ... even as TV, radio, web and print reports all too predictably show celebrations, Iraqi troops manning checkpoints and even some US soldiers playing cards - and also dutifully carry comments one way or the other about how “up to the task” local forces may be.

 

It’s obvious enough that any media outlet would quote and remark on President Barack Obama’s current citing of year's end 2011 as his "final" date for active US deployment in Iraq, for it takes little acumen to highlight that this represents a substantive shift (of “realism”?) from his campaign rhetoric, which spoke of withdrawal within 16 months of his assuming office.

 

Journalists seem split among those who don’t and those who do go the extra distance and try to give authoritative accounts of the real timetable to which policy-makers are now working.

  

 

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IT’S NOT HARD. Much evidence is at hand. One of the most influential planners of Iraq policy has been former Lt Col David Kilcullen of the Australian infantry who after serving in Indonesia, and in breakaway East Timor with the United Nations, helped General David Petreaus to design the famous tactical “surge” of 2007, and later became chief counter-terrorism adviser to then-Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice.

 

Kilcullen is known to have voiced his early condemnation of the Iraq venture as a “stupid” decision. Truth be told, in keeping with the tradition of much Australian geopolitical discourse, he actually called it “f***ing stupid”. However, he tried to correct the record - on his “Small Wars Journal” blog in mid-2008 - with more diplomatic language, and said the war was “an extremely serious strategic error. But the task of the moment is not to cry over spilt milk, rather to help clean it up”.

 

His 2006-7 counterinsurgency proposals (developed of course with other military and political experts) were to become, and remain, guidelines for the Obama Administration, as they had been for George W Bush and Petraeus. While the Bush-to-Obama transition was being worked out toward the end of last year, he told a meeting at Washington’s pretty centrist and pragmatic Center for a New American Security that we could - and here’s the nub - expect to be still active militarily in Iraq for “another five to ten years”.

 

The backdrop, long appreciated in the corridors of decision-making, but in general only tentatively made public, is that insurgencies of such depth as Iraq’s (and we can look from Malaya to Ireland, and at many points in between) must inevitably be measured in decades not years. (And yes, I know that regular readers of THE MEDIA BEAT are very familiar with this refrain of mine.)

 

As so often (regrettably) for total frankness we have to rely on that journalistic mainstay, the individual usually known as “Anonymous”. Such a source - who is very senior in military rank, we are assured – this week told NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszeswki that he “expects large numbers of American troops to be in Iraq for the next 15 to 20 years."

 

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