Michael Barone currently has an upbeat column about Iraq entitled Iraq in historical perspective. (Which I found via Instapundit— but I would have found it myself pretty soon. Really.) Meanwhile, David Warren has an incredibly depressing column entitled “Disaster”, on the same topic. Some light may be shed on this dichotomy by a perusal of the recent analysis provided by Victor Davis Hanson entitled These are Historic Times.
Barone castigates the media for holding Team Bush to a “zero defect” standard:
Today’s media have a zero-defect standard: the Bush administration should have anticipated every eventuality and made detailed plans for every contingency. This is silly. A good second-grade teacher arrives in class with a lesson plan but adapts and adjusts to pupils’ responses and the classroom atmosphere. A good occupying power does the same thing.
As usual with Barone, he supports his arguments with historical parallels:
Jean Edward Smith’s biography of Gen. Lucius Clay reveals that the first time he read the government’s plans for post-World War II Germany was on the flight over there to take charge. William Manchester’s American Caesar shows that Douglas MacArthur, however knowledgeable about the Far East, did not have clear ideas on how to rule postwar Japan. Clay and MacArthur improvised, learned from experience, made mistakes, and corrected them, adjusted to circumstances. It took time: West Germany did not have federal elections until 1949, four years after surrender; the peace treaty with Japan was not signed until 1951.
As Barone correctly notes, the media’s focus on bad facts misses most of the story: “It is news when there is a fatal accident at Disneyland and not news when there is not. But Iraq is not Disneyland. In a country that is occupied after decades of a brutal dictatorship, good news is news.” Exactly. He also points out that there is plenty of countervailing news which shows that the media is not telling us the whole story. He gives a few examples, and notes in particular “reports from soldiers on the ground, circulating widely on the Internet but seldom if ever appearing in old media, indicate that the large majority of Iraqis are friendly and helpful and glad that American troops are there.” (Pat yourselves on the back, O ye citizens of the Blogosphere.)
