The Petraeus Ad, 9 months on

Remember this?

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?

Cooking the Books for the White House

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was "tangible progress" in Iraq and that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward." and last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, "We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress."

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence . . . .

More importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war . . . .

That ad appeared, at a discount, in the NYT 9 months ago today. It is now indisputable that the central premise of the ad was wrong. According to any measure you care to use (Iraqi civillian casualties, US military casualties, suicide bomb attacks, and so on), violence is way down.

And yet, bizarrely, the NYT at times still appears wedded to the central theses of the ad. For example, a May 26 article claimed:

But the tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers.

An editorial appearing on the same day said called the Iraq war an "unwinnable war."

The NYT's attitude even extends to book reviews -- it hypes a book whose title describes the war as a "fiasco", while ignoring a heavily-footnoted inside conservative account.

One could sum up the situation by saying that even though the NYT didn't write the ad, the NYT's coverage of the war has tried to support the central theses of the ad. Even though one of those theses ("the surge has failed") has now been proven false, and the other one ("unwinnable war") is looking more and more likely to be false as well.