and AQ didn’t need any “encouragement” from the MSM to see the strategic value of exploiting Sunni and Shiite divisions to win over whole cities to their banner. … No post that quotes from the Times Online should then condemn the MSM without a little more reflection.

The attack in Samarra took place after the “purple fingers” and is widely regarded as a phase change in the post-Saddam campaign. Before Samarra the MSM was talking about the triumph of the insurgency, of which the battles of Fallujah were supposed to be a part. But at a private talk I heard givn by a senior coalition officer some months ago the time before Sammarra was internally regarded as a moment when the coalition believed it was starting to get the measure of the insurgency. If you read contemporaneous press reports the change in the narrative after Sammarra was striking. No longer was the coalition going to be driven out by insurgents, it was going to be driven out by a civil war.

It is instructive in retrospect to examine just what conclusions some members of the public were reaching simply by reading the papers. At the time of the Fallujas I remember having a private email debate with a Scandinavian researcher, who was convinced, by tallying up MSM reports and readng between the lines, that the USMC had been decimated in both. Those types truly believed the US was hardly inflicting any casualties on the “fleeting” enemy, but killing large numbers of civilians. Somewhat later the Lancet would run a widely reported extrapolation proving that the US had killed off huge nmbers of people in Iraq.

It was all fantasy and yet yet were people who believed it. Where did they get this fantasy? You might be right in thinking that al-Qaeda was always prepared to start a civil war, but I think it is reasonable to argue that they too were getting dosed with this fantasy. We know they read the papers. One of the Jihad’s explicit objectives wasto run information operations. Insurgent units had video teams whose objective wasto generate material and infitrated tame local journalists nto stringing for the wires. It would be a miracle if they didn’t read their own press and maybe it sucked them into a feedback loop.

I remember writing after Sammarra that an attack by the minority on the majority made no logical sense; that it had to be a simultaneous admission of defeat on the part of the insurgency and a strategic catastrophe for them. It was obvious. How can you declare war on the Sh’ite majority of the country and hope it helped you? You’ll recall some people in al-Qaeda were warning of the same danger too. It was just too plain to see. Yet this suicidal strategy eventually became depicted as an act of supreme enemy brilliance, a conclusion which may have stemmed for our own systematic self-deception.

I think its impossible to explain how the success of the Surge could be such a strategic surprise for even well informed people like Kerry and Obama without examing the role of our self-reflection process as influenced by the MSM. We had somehow corrupted our own open source intelligence system and blinded ourselves. It is fortunate for us that Petraeus and his staff at least were looking at other metrics. It’s almost impossible now to recall how gloomy the atmosphere was after the mid-term elections. At the start of the Surge I had the privilege of interviewing members of the Baker Commission by telephone. The Baker Commission, if you will recall, was drafting ways to escape from the “quagmire” in which America was irretrievably engulfed. That was the measure of how deep the certainty of defeat was. What if we had done it? I’ll freely admit that I bought into many aspects of the perceived truth as well. My guess is that the AQ did too.

I am perfectly serious in claiming that some historian will eventually write a long scholarly book asking how we could have failed to predict that the Surge had a chance. People were so sure it would fail. It will be right up there with the failure to anticipate the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now I understand the irony of having to quote the MSM to revile the MSM; to cite them for both for truth and falsity; aware that due to the rise of the Internet even this site may now be part of the modern MSM. I suppose I’m guilty. But I’ll accept that in exchange for the chance to suggest that AQ made the mistake of believing their own press clippings and it led them astray.