Again, an interesting testament of faith in media that have been unable to back up particular tales of violence, and have been caught doctoring evidence.

Nevertheless, I don’t claim access to Truth either, and have to piece things together as best I can, as we all do, or should. I certainly agree that we should not simply throw away any report that goes against our assumptions, hopes or wishes — nor do I think we should simply accept any report that supports the same. Regardless of politics, skepticism is a helpful starting point.

Oh, and it’s a bit rich to see the frequently arrogant and insulting “anon” whine now about incivility. He set the tone.

For the record, I never sought information to flatter my preconceptions. I, foolishly, believed in 2003 that invading Iraq would be a good idea, and expected information coming from Iraq to confirm this belief. When it didn’t, I had to, over a period of months (maybe years?) revise what I believed. So I realize that it may seem obvious that people who disagree with you believe the news because it flatters their preconceptions, while you are much more intellectually rigorous, that’s not always the case.

So I wonder, in all genuine curiosity about your epistemology: how do you know what you know about Iraq, and how do you know you know what you know?

No. Like a stuck clock, occasionally anon says something more or less correct. But there’s a converse to this proposition as well — this distortion (i.e., systemic bias in the media) does not validate ideologically pleasant information, either. In fact, a critical intelligence would want to be cautious about accepting general impressions that flatter one’s preconceptions anyway, and all the more so when the impressions are conveyed by media already biased in one’s favor.

…then one should have been willing to accept the realistic costs of doing so. There would have been no shame in believing that the cost, while terrible, would have been worth it. But no one wanted to say this, and instead wanted to say that it would be, essentially, a cakewalk. Four years later, woops!

“do you ever read bloggers like INF, Yon and Roggio?”

No. Do you?

“give us your assessment of troop morale in Iraq”

I don’t know much about troop morale in Iraq. I have heard, from several people here, that anecdotally, troop morale is high. I also know that over a thousand soldiers, Iraq veterans included, recently signed a petition in favor of withdrawal, and that incidences of PTSD are high among returning troops. Troop morale is fairly hard to gauge when most troops in Iraq are, you know, in Iraq and not sitting here telling me about morale. All I know is what the EVIL MEDIA tells me.

Actually, no. My thesis is, roughly, that while media representations of reality are inherently inaccurate, because a re-presentation of reality can never be reality – for a variety of reasons, only one of which is “bias,” – but that this distortion does not invalidate ideologically unpleasant information. That is, even if there is systematic bias, the sheer volume of reporting by a huge range of reporters (in which group I will include US government officials who report information on Iraq) indicates that things are, on the whole, pretty awful there. When the US government releases statistics that indicate things are getting worse, the issue of “media bias” becomes basically irrelevant. You can crow all you want that this newspaper or that reporter is biased, but even if you only read official numbers coming from the US government itself, you’d have to conclude that things are going very poorly.

“do you want us to win in Iraq”

If by this question you mean something like “Do you want Iraq to become a prosperous democracy, at peace with itself and its neighbors, from which no terrorism originates and in which no US troops need be stationed for our benefit or the benefit of Iraqis?” – then yes, I wish for this. I also wish for a pony and x-ray vision and the superpower of flight. Whether I want this to happen is largely irrelevant – I don’t believe it can happen. I don’t believe this primarily because foreign powers can rarely have much impact on the survival of a domestic insurgency, historically. I’m guessing that you’re definition of “winning” is something like “the US and its ally, the Iraqi government, defeat all enemies of the Iraqi government fighting against it.” The problem with this is that the Iraqi government is part of the problem, composed in large part of Shi’a militias which are, in effect, no better than the Sunni militias fighting against it. I don’t believe that we can achieve (what I assume to be) your definition of victory because, no matter how invested we are in a country of 26 million thousands of miles away, the people who actually live there and view this as a literal life-or-death struggle will always be more invested than us.

“what suggestions do you have for us to win in Iraq?”

I don’t think there ever was a possibility for us to “win” according to the above-defined metric. We could easily overthrow Saddam and, if they had existed, eliminate his WMD programs. That’s about it – but it’s important to remember that the very real and very likely result of removing a country’s government without a substantial replacement was going to be insurgency and civil war in that country. A more sober assessment prior to 2003 would have dealt with this reality – if one believed that toppling Saddam were truly vital, then one should have been willi