Atrios Watch

There's a trend among left-wing blogs - lots of them have a naive faith in the writings of "Atrios", whose "Eschaton" is an anonyblog with immense traffic.

Atrios seems to have perfected a style of blogging that would seem to have propagated itself among a lot of smaller lefty blogs; take a piece of news, carefully excise context, deliver it with an ironic comment, and call it an indictment of the President/conservatives/conservatism/whatever the target of their ire is.

I took a while today to go through "Eschaton". Dreary.

For example, this piece:

The first part of April has been the bloodiest period so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. There were 87 deaths by hostile fire in the first 15 days of this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the invasion, when 82 Americans were killed in action.

Right. The first week of the war was the last time we faced any organized resistance on the part of Iraqi troops. After that, no Iraqi military units fought us - merely hit-and-run attacks by Fedayeen that killed relatively few troops but caused a lot of consternation on the part of the media.

The current battles in Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle are the first large-scale organized action the enemy has really offered.

And while we've suffered the heaviest casualties of the war, Atrios (like the media) completely ignores the accomplishments of the troops - and the strategy. The Shi'ite radicals have marginalized themselves politically, and exposed themselves to exctinction militarily. Sistani, the main Shi'a leader, has disowned them after seeing the near-omnipotence of a US military that moves with deliberation to destroy its opposition rather than coddle it.

In short - Americans died in record numbers (in the context of a war with record low casualties), but we are in the process of winning a victory we'd have had to have won at some point - and at some cost - anyway.

Then Atrios steers into complete absurdity:

"This has been some pretty intense fighting," said David Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization. "We're looking at what happened during the major battles of Vietnam."
The last time U.S. troops experienced a two-week loss such as this one in Iraq was October 1971, two years before U.S. ground involvement ended in Vietnam.

Right.

But October of 1971 was a time when we were cutting down our involvement in Vietnam. By Vietnam was standards, it was a slow week, and getting slower. Much slower.

This past month in Fallujah and the Triangle have not been a "Slow and slowing" period. This is more the Iraqi evquivalent of the Tet Offensive - a spasmically violent, possibly last-ditch effort by a powerful, well-armed but beleaguered guerilla movement (backed by North Vietnamese during Tet, and possibly Syria and Iran today). Both failed, although both cost the US dearly.

How dearly? We've lost 87 American dead in two weeks.

In Tet? Two thousand dead.

Two Thousand.

They have one thing in common; both were US victories, intended to shatter the resolve if the US home front.

In Tet, it worked. Today, despite the best efforts of our anti-Bush media and the likes of Atrios, it will not.

Atrios' popularity is a symptom of the historical illiteracy of the American left - and the gaping ignorance of all too many left-wing bloggers.

I'll continue to fisk Eschaton - partly for the fun of it, partly to show the various leftybloggers the house of cards they've put themselves in.

Posted by Mitch at April 19, 2004 06:41 AM