Waffling On Winning

San Diego, like most metropolitan areas, has a liberal center surrounded by a more conservative suburbia, in San Diego’s case a bit less liberal in-all than most. Its major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune exhibits similar tendencies, its reporting mostly drawn from liberal newswires (although often blended to get better info) but its editorial and opinion pages containing less liberal lock-step than most.

This has been played out in its recent editorials on Iraq, exhibiting the lack of clear-sightedness that plagues our media, and how secondary markets are affected by the leading memes that emanate from New York and Washington newswires.

On September 13, in a major switch from cautious support for the prospects of the US mission in Iraq, the collective wisdom of a majority of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board switched sides. The September 13 editorial bemoaned, as Democrats and the New York Times led the charge,

Bush appears determined to press ahead on the very same path he has pursued without success for the last four years, which is to count on U.S. military forces to install a stable democracy in Iraq. …The anguishing dilemma in Iraq cannot be solved by military means, but rather only by political accommodations worked out among Iraqis themselves. The president's failure to heed this reality has left U.S. forces stranded in a civil war in which Shiites and Sunnis attack each other without restraint – and both sides attack U.S. forces… Congress alone has the authority to chart a different course.

The Letters page of the San Diego Union-Tribune is said to reflect the proportions of opinions received. By 2 to 1, the letters were critical of this editorial. Mine said,

The editorial “More of the same/Bush war strategy offers slim hope of success” (Sept. 13) ignores and denies all the news of change of strategy and of resulting progress in Iraq, including its acknowledgment even by critics of our former course. There are even beginnings of political accommodations now among sects now that security is improving, and isolation of the extremists.

The Democrats insisted on high benchmarks to reach after only a few months of “surge,” so no one should be surprised that a complete reformation has not occurred yet. All, however, are surprised at how far the security improvements have come, including previously written-off Anbar covering roughly a third of Iraq. As often with frustrated critics, the Union-Tribune ends by asking “to chart a different course” without a clue what that is outside of abandonment, even though all recognize that would create a worse regional firestorm to fill the resulting vacuum.

Today’s editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune reverses course, as have many editorial pages and much reporting in other papers, as the lack of progress meme crumbles. The editorial admits,

We counted ourselves skeptics on the surge strategy but it's difficult to argue with the results to date.

Sunday opinion section editor Robert Caldwell offers why it’s “Now A Winnable War”:

The stunning turnaround in U.S. military fortunes in Iraq is now so obvious that it's getting page-one treatment and network/cable broadcast time by an American press long preoccupied with reporting this war's negatives. There are lessons here for anyone who will examine the facts in Iraq, perhaps even for Democrats in Congress and those running for president whose unchanging mantra remains “we've lost, get out now.”…

So, what do we learn from all this?…

Caldwell presents the military successes, the turning on Al Quaeda, the distribution of oil revenues on a per capita basis even though legislation isn’t yet passed. But, most important, Caldwell points to the psychological reinforcement of the “surge” to Iraqis that the US is committed to their peaceful ends.

It’s a similar story at home in the US. The opponents of the war keep scratching for negatives, while Americans become more aware that the opponents are wrong about the trend. Some media are begrudgingly following their customers into lessened negativity, while others “hang weak.” The declining audience for the major media ought to be a telling indicator of how lessening the regard major media is held by more and more Americans. As the race for 2008 picks up speed, it will be interesting to see whether major media are learning anything on other issues from the fallout from their evident erroneous slant on Iraq.