Today’s Huffington Post cherry picks a four year old
quote from Atkinson’s report on IEDs.
The Washington Post today prints the first in a series of stories by Rick Atkinson on the IED threat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon’s response to it. The title of the piece: “‘The IED problem is getting out of control. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.’” That quote is damning, but fortunately, it’s also four years old:
It’s heard to say where this series is going, and to be honest, I don’t have too many complaints about the first piece. As a history of the IED problem, it seems accurate so far, ending in mid-2004 with the military’s “Manhattan Project-like” approach to defeating the IED. I remain deeply skeptical of that approach, which the military pursued with little success in an attempt to find a technological rather than a tactical solution to the IED problem. There is no silver-bullet, miracle jammer, or armored vehicle that will completely eliminate the threat from the IED–the only real solution is to kill the bad guys who are building, facilitating, and emplacing these devices. But Atkinson seems to get that, quoting Admiral Macy in the introduction to the series:
And then Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England:
Indeed. Here’s the recent analysis from Former Spook:
We’re still a long way from defeating the IED, and further still from victory in Iraq, but this headline is a cheap shot at a time when the exact opposite is true–the military may finally be getting the IED problem under control, and as MRAP vehicles begin making their way over to Iraq, the situation is likely to improve even further. We still have to stop the bleeding, but there too, the trend is overwhelmingly positive. Atkinson’s introduction appears cautiously optimistic, but the defeatist left, desperate for bad news, is sure to cherry pick the worst bits from this report, as the Huffington Post has done by putting up the four year old quote that Atkinson’s editors chose to use as a headline. But that doesn’t change the real story here: IED fatalities are down 64 percent over the last six months. What are the chances of a headline like that popping up in the Washington Post at the end of this series?
