The Media Embarasses Itself on Iraq, Again

Talk about the media showing its cards too soon...

Late this morning, after tending to my usual early Sunday routine, I sat down started to read the latest edition of the Providence Journal. The first thing I noticed was the lead story titled "Militias hold in fight for Basra". Nothing notable about the article itself - just your typical story highlighting our looming defeat in Iraq. As I had been reading and hearing something entirely different about how things were going in Basra, I went online to find the article in order to link to it in a post that I was going to compose. When I did, I was quite surprised to find that the article was missing from the ProJo website. Luckily, since it was just a reprint of a New York Times' article, we can still see it on their website: Shiite Militias Cling to Swaths of Basra and Stage Raids. Here's the first few paragraphs of the article - the text of which was the same in both the NYT and the Providence Journal:

BAGHDAD — Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.

Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.

Ironically, at about the same time I was looking up this article, Muqtada al-Sadr surrendered. The Iranian-backed cleric ordered his militia, the Mahdi Army, to drop its weapons and leave Basra. Something tells me that if the NYT story was true, and the Mahdi Army did control "wide swaths" of Basra, were setting up "checkpoints", and were accepting the surrender of members of the Iraqi security forces (as the obviously staged image below from the New York Times and Getty Images seems to indicate), Muqtada al-Sadr wouldn't be surrendering and giving up his weapons.

Luckily, anyone who is interested in what's really going on in Iraq has other resources that they can depend on. Here's the true story on what happened in Basra from Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal, Sadr orders followers to end fighting. An excerpt:

Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces. Sadr’s call for an end to the fighting comes as his Mahdi Army has taken serious losses since the operation began.

"Sadr has sent a message to his loyalists urging them to end all armed activities," the Al Iraqiya television channel reported. Sadr "disowned anyone attacking the state institutions or parties' offices and headquarters."

"Based on responsibility towards Iraq and to stem Iraqi bloodshed and to preserve the country's unity and integrity as a prelude to its independence, I call on the people to be up to their responsibility and awareness in order to maintain Iraq's stability," according to a statement issued by Sadr and sent to Voices of Iraq. Sadr has called for the government to free members of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist Movement captured during recent operations.

This must be so embarrassing for the media. They were hoping for a major US defeat...