"Good News From Iraq" aka Pure Fiction

It seems US claims that their forces helped Iraqi police kill up to 85 terrrrrrsts at a remote camp yesterday are not true. The attack was widely acclaimed as a major victory over the insurgents and even a "turning point" for Iraq. As tex at antiwar.com says, if "one the most hopeful signs we've gotten yet from Iraq" turns out to be a hoax, what does that say about the entire project?

"Iraqi police commandos backed by U.S. troops killed at least 45 militants, many of them foreign fighters, in an hours-long battle to seize an insurgent camp north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday."

--Reuters, yesterday

"It's hard to overstate how fantastic a development this is, but let's try. I wrote last December about insurgent overconfidence. Is this ever a case in point!"

--Spencer Ackerman, New Republic

"Up to 40 fighters were seen today at a Iraq lakeside training camp attacked by US and Iraqi forces a day before and said they had never left, an AFP correspondent who visited the site said."

--Agence France Presse, today

Juan Cole provides more detailed analysis:

Agence France Presse... managed to get some independent journalists up to the lake, north of Samarra, and they found 40 guerrillas still there. The guerrillas denied that 85 of their fellows had been killed by the Iraqi army, but admitted that 11 had been killed by US aerial bombardment.

American news organizations such as CNN refuse to report news that is only carried by AFP, because they consider it to have inadequate journalistic quality-control. But reports like this one are not being done by US wire services in Iraq, and if we don't take AFP seriously, we essentially may as well just believe whatever Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and the Pentagon claim.

Unfortunately, the US military is filtering our news from Iraq, and we only hear about a fraction of the violence that actually takes place there. What we do hear is often imbued by a kind of US boosterism (such as the recent faintly ridiculous claim that Fallujah is the safest city in Iraq-- as though it were still an inhabited city)...