Good News From Iraq?

Two articles, two sources, one theme: "Not all the news from Iraq is bad." Does this signal a tidal shift in attitude at some media outlets? An acknowledgement that they might have overdone the "we're losing the war / its a quagmire" angle? Is it a response to alternative information sources (ahem)?

Or a cynical attempt to establish "balance" claims for the preponderance of "we're losing war / it's a quagmire" coverage still to come?

U.S. News & World Report starts here:

Targets. On the highways, there is only tension. To soldiers, every broken-down car is a potential bomb; every tumbleweed may disguise an artillery shell set to explode. With dozens of bombs found each week, soldiers have good reason to be anxious. The military has responded by adding armor plating on humvees and many transport trucks. But the improvised bombs have grown increasingly sophisticated; insurgents, for instance, are rigging explosives to highway overpasses to hit the exposed humvee gunners. "It's a matter of getting through as fast as you can," says Lt. Mike Byrnes, an officer with the 10th Mountain Division, who has escorted convoys both inside and outside Baghdad. Insurgents, he says, "are trying to disrupt the supply lines. They hit a big truck full of fuel, ammo, or food--that hurts us. We depend on these convoys. Without 'em, we don't get what we need."

In an apparent sign of the stress of such missions, 18 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, a reserve unit from South Carolina, are under investigation for refusing to make a 200-mile convoy run of fuel trucks to Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad.

But then goes here:

Small talk. In the village of Salaam, just south of Baghdad, Army Capt. Scott Shaw patrols the streets tasked with the job of preventing insurgents from bringing down an airplane with a rocket. Shaw is a dynamic company commander who seems to genuinely enjoy interacting with Iraqis. "I know this village like the back of my hand," he says. Shaw walks around asking residents about the price of rice and eggs, checking for signs of inflation at the food markets. He relishes taking meals with people in his area. Strangely, it reminds him of home, Little Rock, Ark. "Iraqis eat more okra than anyone I've met," he says. "They have this soup of tomatoes and okra. I could eat that every day." He talks about the upcoming election, quizzing residents about whether they know the location of the polling place. Encountering the son of a local sheik, Shaw exchanges kisses with him in greeting and asks how the new water pump he secured for him is working.

Meanwhile the LA Times starts here:

Last week, the Onion offered a satirical story with a Baghdad dateline: "After 19 months of struggle in Iraq, U.S. military officials conceded a loss to Iraqi insurgents Monday, but said America can be proud of finishing 'a very strong second.' "

Not even Michael Moore would suggest that's about to happen.

Yet the reportage from Iraq is almost as bleak. Even as some media gurus accuse journalists of naively accepting officials' positive spin on the war, the sweep of coverage suggests that Iraq's occupiers have turned post-invasion chaos into a hellish nightmare and perhaps a quagmire ? and the consensus is that matters will only grow worse.

Then moves here:

At least a few less-intimately involved observers also glimpse hope amid the televised images of 24-hour carnage, among them Christopher Hitchens, Michael Rubin, Frederick W. Kagan and Gary Schmitt.

Hitchens

...On the other hand, there are some unambiguous gains. The Marsh Arabs, former inhabitants of the largest wetlands in the region and victims of an ecocidal assault, have seen their ancient habitat partly re-flooded. Politics has returned to the Iraqi Shiite discourse, which now has a reciprocal influence on the important debate within neighboring Iran. Iraq has been verifiably disarmed (not quite the same as taking Hussein's or Hans Blix's word for it) and the socially devastating epoch of Hussein-plus-sanctions (vamped on by the U.N. in its disgraceful Oil for Blood program) is over.

Democratic voices are being raised insistently, in Syria and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and though you may say this would have happened anyway, there is no doubt of what ignited the current debate...

Rubin

...Iraqis complain about security but are positive about the future. They reflect optimism not only in polls but also in actions. The new Iraqi currency, issued on Oct. 15, 2003, at 2,000 Iraqi dinars to the dollar, is free of Hussein's image. It is also free-floating, and even at the height of the April uprising and the battle for Najaf, it remained stable, trading between 1,400 and 1,500 dinars to the dollar. If Iraq is in trouble, don't tell the Canadians: The dinar regularly outperforms the Canadian dollar on international markets.

Iraqis also express confidence with investment, which spans the country. Electricity is unreliable, so restaurateurs have invested as much as $50,000 for top-model generators. A new clothing boutique represents a $200,000 investment. There are new hotels in Najaf and Karbala. Cigarette venders have traded pushcarts for tobacco shops. Kurdish investors are constructing a cancer treatment center in Erbil. In the slums of Sadr City, houses cost $45,000, nearly double their prewar value. In the swankier district of Mansur, new houses sell for more than 10 times that amount.

No Iraqi would invest his or her life savings if they feared civil war or perpetual lawlessness.

Freedom matters. Before the war, only the top 3,000 Hussein loyalists could access the Internet. Today, more than 100,000 households have dial-up connections. This number does not reflect the thousands of young Iraqi men who surf the Web (and try to pick up women) at cafes that dot cities, small towns and villages.

During Hussein's rule, 1 out of 6 Iraqis fled the country as refugees. Not only has there not been a mass exodus since Iraq's liberation, but more than a million refugees have returned.

Even at the height of the insurgents' bombing campaign, young men lined up at recruitment stations, not only for the salary but also to make Iraq a better place.

The television cameras do not lie, but they fail to give full perspective. The fiercest critics of the situation inside Iraq are those who have never been there. The coalition has made mistakes, and Iraqis are frequently frustrated at the pace of change. But they do see light at the end of the tunnel...

Kagan

...The operational good news coming out of Iraq was the destruction of the Mahdi army that served the rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. The militia had effectively occupied the holy cities of Iraq, including the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf. The conventional wisdom was that the U.S. military would be unable to expel the rebels from their redoubts without causing an explosion of anti-Americanism in the Shiite world. Yet U.S. personnel combined measured force, diplomatic negotiations and skillful deployments to retake Najaf and recover the shrines without inflicting any substantial damage on them. There was no outcry in Iraq or the Muslim world at large, and some Iraqis even took to the streets to protest Sadr's actions. U.S. and Iraqi forces removed a threat to the development of a peaceful and democratic Iraq...

Schmitt

What's gone right in Iraq? Start with the obvious: Hussein is gone. Whatever the problems in Iraq, they pale in comparison with the history of Hussein's tyranny. Thousands upon thousands were persecuted, tortured and executed. Neighboring states were under threat and, twice, invaded at the cost of hundreds of thousands of casualties. Hussein spent massively for his own pleasure and weapons, while allowing the welfare of Iraq's citizens to deteriorate.

Nor, as the recently released Iraq Survey Group report makes clear, was Hussein a problem of the past. The sanctions regime was collapsing, and the former Iraqi president had every reason to expect he would soon be free again to rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Waiting in the wings were Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, two predators equally involved in supporting their father's reign of terror, domestically and internationally. No, as Arizona Sen. John McCain has put it: "The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close?. Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat..."

I've only posted brief excerpts of these "good news" reports - but the entire collection is well worth the read.

Still while I'm glad to see some small mention of the truth in reporting from Iraq, why do the good news stories from this country, at least when reported in mainstream media, require several careful paragraphs explaining that it's an exception to the rule? That chaos is actually the order of the day?

And why is the above piece (surprisingly headlined "What's Going Right In Iraqi") in the Opinion section?