Iraq Elections: Why were we so surprised?

Arthur Chernkoff, an Australian blogger who writes Chernkoff had a piece published today in the WSJ on-line "Opinion Journal" subtitled "A Roundup of the Past Two Weeks' Good News from Iraq." He notes that readers of the New York Times -- and other major media (other than the WSJ, of course) -- must have felt like they had "gone through a time-warp" when they opened their papers Sunday (and again today, he might have added) to read accounts of the Iraqi elections. He's right. I did. As the elections demonstrate, there are a lot of good things happening in Iraq -- and probably in Afghanistan as well. Yet much of that good news doesn't get reported at all and what does get reported rates at most brief a "by the way" down in the bowels of articles emphasizing the growing strength of the insurgency and the death tolls it is causing.

Why is that? I think it probably has a lot to do with pure spite. We (I include myself in this group) so despise the decision to invade Iraq in that the prospect of a stable, secular democracy in Iraq fills us with almost as much (maybe more) dread than does the prospect of America sneaking ignobly out of Iraq and of Iraq descending into something like the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It is important, we think, that really stupid decisions result in really bad outcomes so as to avoid creating incentives to make similarly stupid decisions in the future. The power of this dark side to the opposition of the war is so seductive that we find ourselves subconsciously wishing for the worst -- and find in the insurgency story more than enough "news" to allow us to conclude that "we were right!"

That's a horrible mistake. However wrong-headed the original invasion was, we have to get over that antipathy and hope that the results turn out well -- even if that ends up meaning that Bush and the neo-cons get to crow. And, in this regard, the elections -- and the reporting one them -- are nothing but good news. I hope that we can continue to focus on that side of the developments in Iraq -- and Afghanistan -- as assiduously as we focus on the problems.