Mike Pence has always struck me as one of the handful of members of Congress who generally have their heads in the right place on the role of government, but his normal skepticism about the efficacy of state power has not been much in evidence when it comes to Iraq, from which he’s now blogging. A lot of his most recent post deals with conversations with soldiers and is of the familiar “why won’t the media report all the good we’re doing?” stripe. I’d like to believe that’s a representative attitude, that things are going better than we’ve led to believe, and so on, but my worry is that there’s going to be enough selection bias in the interactions public figures have on these kind of orchestrated trips that, whatever their feelings about the war, they’ll end up talking predominantly to folks who’ll confirm the attitude they had going in. (Via Instapundit.
Pence in Baghdad
April 4th, 2007 · 1 Comment
Tags: Random Cool Link
1 response so far ↓
1 Barry // Apr 5, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I have a few guesses – first, the military will do its best to screen who comes into contact with the media. Any captain who lets a negative remark get into mass circulation had best update his/her resume on Monster. Second, it’s an excellent propagana technique – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolchstosslegende. A casual perusal of right-wing sites will show that this is a popular lie.
Third is investment – there are a lot of military people who’ve suffered for years; admitting failure would have to hurt a lot. And if they tend to be right-wing, admitting that the right wing in the USA used them like sh*t would probably hurt far too much to accept. Note how many vietnam vets were quick to curse ‘draft-dodging Democrats’, but seemed to accept those poor GOP politicians who hadn’t been able to get to Nam.
The final comment is that very few American soldiers will realize what it’s like to be an Iraqi. Both the realization that the US forces are *foreigners* in their country, and from the fact that US troops get to go back to fortified bases. Iraqis have to live there (or die there, or increasingly to flee from there).