{"id":1644,"date":"2007-11-16T09:50:56","date_gmt":"2007-11-16T14:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1644"},"modified":"2007-11-16T09:52:10","modified_gmt":"2007-11-16T14:52:10","slug":"start-your-stopwatches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1644","title":{"rendered":"Start Your Stopwatches"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m looking for the first instance of someone in lefty politics or the media taking this news<\/a> out of context:<\/p>\n

Attacks against British and Iraqi forces have plunged by 90 percent in southern Iraq since London withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, the commander of British forces there said.<\/p>\n

The presence of British forces in downtown Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, was the single largest instigator of violence, Maj. Gen. Graham Binns told reporters Thursday on a visit to Baghdad’s Green Zone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m gonna watch for talking heads, leftybloggers and MSM stopping the report right there<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, that wouldn’t be the whole story:<\/p>\n

With an overwhelmingly Shiite population, Basra has not seen the level of sectarian violence that has torn Iraq apart since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine north of Baghdad.<\/p>\n

But it has seen major fighting between insurgents and coalition troops, as well as between Shiite militias vying for control of the city and its security forces.<\/p>\n

British officials expected a spike in such “intra-militia violence” after they pulled back from the city’s center, and were surprised to find none, Binns said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And watch for this bit here…:<\/p>\n

“That’s because the Sadrist militia is all powerful here \u2014 more powerful than Badr. If Badr was allowed to take on JAM in Basra, they’d lose pretty quickly,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…to be portrayed as a failure, rather than a key part <\/em>of fighting this sort of counterinsurgency; picking the most powerful, most stability-enhancing, most co-optable local faction and playing it against the others. It’s counterintuitive to people who are commited to democracy, now<\/em>, including many neoconservatives. (Steven Vincent approached it suspiciously but clinically in his writing<\/a> about the British zone; he was eventually murdered in Basra).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m looking for the first instance of someone in lefty politics or the media taking this news out of context: Attacks against British and Iraqi forces have plunged by 90 percent in southern Iraq since London withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, the commander of British forces there said. The presence of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}