Gaining Ground

"It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

From the NYT today is a story about the corruption that will be part of the phase we're now entering in the war, as casualties keep falling at a statistically significant level among Iraqi civilians. As the article makes clear, the level of corruption is daunting:

"The collective filching undermines Iraq’s ability to provide essential services, a key to sustaining recent security gains, according to American military commanders. It also sows a corrosive distrust of democracy and hinders reconciliation as entrenched groups in the Shiite-led government resist reforms that would cut into reliable cash flows."

This is not news, we've known about the corruption for a while. But this is an informative glimpse of the enemy we're about to engage: opportunity and need outstripping cultural boundaries of acceptable behavior. The mantra to remember here is that we're going to work towards culturally acceptable levels of corruption, not an absolute end to it. If even the US congress could manage that, we'd be in phenomenal shape.

What we're seeing in these cases is, very simply, the same sort of crime that every nation deals with at some level or another, and it is generally driven by one single cause. That cause happens to be poverty, whether any nation would like to admit it or not. The solution will also be just as obvious - ensure that the crime doesn't pay, ensure that the law applies to as many people as possible, and give people an honest and acceptable way out. That means jobs, laws, and police accountability, all of which are works in progress. That's where the strategy is headed next.

On a separate note, General Petraeus' grasp of the situation is impressive, and very encouraging. At Gateway Pundit, there's this quote that is fairly revealing:

"I would not have recommended what I did in September, if I would not have projected what we are now seeing in Iraq... "

And what is it that we're seeing? We're seeing corruption take the main stage, replacing violence as the big story. Not that the latter isn't still a problem, or that we're going to stop working on it, but the shift in the information war is made obvious by this article: media knows perfectly well that good news doesn't pay well, and that's why they're not talking about casualties. Which - and you had to see this coming - angers at least one person.

Over at HuffPo, Jeffrey Feldman apparently sees a conspiracy theory when it comes to news from Iraq:

"Ye olde holiday good times cannot and should not be uses[sic] as an an excuse to knock Iraq off the front pages--should not be rolled out by America's big media outlets to dampen America's awareness of the biggest issue facing us."

News flash for Jeffrey: The blackout you're talking about is really a body-count blackout, and that's occurring because violence is down. The real blackout didn't start today, it started in September after Petraeus' report to Congress - when news was first broken that things have been improving. The Right saw it plain as day, while the Left was busy engaging themselves with crap like this.