Turning Points

Greyhawk

David Broder in The Washington Post:

On Monday, to mark the third anniversary of President Bush's appearance on the USS Lincoln to announce that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada issued a news release in which Bush's text was set in contrast to barbed reminders of everything that has gone wrong in Iraq since that boast.

Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis in The Boston Globe:

Three years ago this week, President Bush declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq in front of a ''mission accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

But as events have demonstrated, the mission is far from accomplished.

Catching a pattern here? These are just two examples from today's news and commentary. There have been countless others this week - pro and con the events of the intervening years. Google "mission accomplished" for a sample.

But in most cases something like this statement follows close on the heels of those opening lines:

Bush's ''stay-the-course" strategy in Iraq is unsustainable. Iraq's costs -- about 2,400 US military personnel killed and nearly 18,000 wounded, more than $300 billion spent, and US ground forces stretched to the breaking point -- are not worth the results.

Ignore for a moment any current fiction that the President's message that day was that we were finished with Iraq. (Otherwise you must ignore what was actually said: "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave — and we will leave behind a free Iraq.") The passage of three years has certainly revealed the painful cost of that vision, and the accuracy of this quote from that speech too: "The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide. No act of the terrorists will change our purpose, or weaken our resolve, or alter their fate. Their cause is lost. Free nations will press on to victory." You can decide for yourself whether your resolve has weakened - or if you ever had any to start with.

But the passage of three years certainly gives us an opportunity to evaluate what has gone right and wrong with that mission. And along with that we can now identify events that - unlike that particular speech - have actually proven to be turning points in the war.

The anniversary of one such event passed (virtually unnoticed) within the past seven days too.

*****

Since those who choose to remind us of the "mission accomplished" speech also cite death tolls, lets look at those numbers. In the weeks prior to that speech, there were 172 coalition military fatalities in Operation Iraqi Freedom (a number lower by orders of magnitude than the most dire pre-war predictions). In the 12 months that followed (May 2003 through April 2004 - a period that includes the first battle in Fallujah) the fatality rate dropped to an average of 52 a month (a number higher than any advocates of the invasion would consider acceptable).

But in the next 12 months - May 2004 through April 2005 - the death rate jumped by 46% from the previous one-year period, to an average of 76 per month. Actually monthly totals reveal significant spikes associated with specific events - elections, Ramadan, combat ops in Fallujah - but even after eliminating these from the equations a stark contrast between the two periods is evident.

Clearly a turning point had been reached. No one event can be authoritatively cited as the sole cause for the increase, but a confluence of events occurred in the spring of 2004 that can account for most of the surge in violence. Two in particular can be highlighted as most significant. Both involve the release of images of brutality, with subsequent wide exposure through the world media, though only one lingers to this day in countless subsequent coverage.

Oddly enough, it is the lesser evil of the two.

Early April, 2004:

WASHINGTON - Every war or disaster contains moments that become defining images: a napalmed girl or a gun to the head in Vietnam, the body of a U.S. soldier dragged through a Somalian street.
It is not clear whether the 80 seconds of video Wednesday showing images of charred American bodies being beaten and dangled from the steelwork of a bridge over the Euphrates River will come to define the war in Iraq.

But once again, broadcasters and news executives were torn between a question of taste and the demand to give viewers and readers information that could affect the course of history.

"War is a horrible thing. It is about killing," ABC News "Nightline" Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program's e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday's killings. "If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again."

The images have been seldom seen since - but at the time the media spent a significant amount of time pondering whether displaying at all them would increase or erode public support for the war in Iraq.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that networks' "sanitization of war may have helped the administration prosecute the war" a year ago.

During the height of the war, few pictures of slain American soldiers were shown and news photographers were not allowed at places where they could shoot images of coffins being shipped home.

Torn over whether to air the scenes of graphic, inhuman carnage, one factor ultimately made the decision worth the risk:

Whether news executives made the proper decisions may take years of perspective to determine.

But the real effect of the images on Americans could be felt just months from now.

"These are the kinds of pictures that will linger," said John Schulz, dean of Boston University's College of Communications and a former faculty member at the National War College.

"They'll be there in November when people go to vote."

Actually by November they were long forgotten. But within days of the atrocity coalition forces would launch an all-out assault on Fallujah.

(More to follow)