Getting it wrong at Newsweak

Dave Price:

None of it, apparently, gives Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh the slightest clue about what's actually happening in Iraq.

The Washington commentariat has suggested recently that Bush seems ready to pronounce the imminent end of his “surge,” which by several accounts has failed both to secure large parts of Baghdad and, on a more strategic level, to prod the still-paralyzed Iraqi government to govern.

Maybe if Hirsh spent less time with the Washington commentariat and more time listening to generals he would know all the troops for the surge haven't even arrived yet, and many won't be deployed into the surge for some time even after they do arrive. How many times has Petraeus said the strategy will take all summer to unfold? Sheesh. Hirsh would have called the D-Day invasion a failure before our troops even got to Normandy.

...the Shiite-led government, which is increasingly dominated by the virulently anti-American Sadr,...

Uh, no. His ministers resigned from the government; at the time, it was called "a blow to the Maliki government." How can such basic errors survive Hirsh's fact-checkers? Or do they simply accept that any bad news must be true, even if it directly contradicts other alleged bad news?

...

The "fact checkers" must have the same bias. The eagerness with which many in the media want to lose this war is appalling. It appears that they believe the awful consequences of defeat will be worth it, if it defeats Republicans and prevents the use of force in the future to defend the country. Their willful ignorance of warfare is on display in their "reporting" and "analysis." Newsweak has been one of the worst in this regard, but even they ahd to admit last week that the situation in Anbar province has turned against al Qaeda. In doing so they remained clueless as to the strategic consequences of that loss to al Qaeda. They now no longer have their ratlines from Syria and must rely on internal generation of funds which has further alienated them from Sunnies in other areas of Iraq. That is why Sunnies in Baghdad and Diyala have turned against them. They are also suffering a shortage of "martyrs" to use as human bombs.