Al Sadr Is a No Show at Samarra

"Remember how Moqtada Al Sadr's people said last week that he would lead a unity prayer at the mosque in Samarra today? Naturally news reports make it look as though Al Sadr drew another large crowd. But they don't mention that Al Sadr stood up his followers. Plenty of Iraqis attended prayers at the mosque today, but they would have with or without Al Sadr.

Newspapers such as WaPo regularly wrote about Moqtada Al Sadr as though he was the one who would emerge to be the next leader of Iraq. When Iraqis tried to speak up and say that prediction was not likely to be accurate, we were dismissed. So how have the media dealt with their miserable coverage of the conflict?

Some in the mainstream media continue to argue that Iraq is a lost cause. "'The surge failed,' Thomas Ricks, the longtime Washington Post correspondent, said during a CNN interview on February 20. Ricks has written two books about the Iraq war: 'Fiasco' and the recently published, 'The Gamble.'"

Sure there are people who will choose to believe Ricks who insists that he was and still is right on Iraq. But we just spoke with our family in Baghdad who said that everything is better. The security, the water, the electricity, it's all better. It's not there yet, but Iraq is on its way back."
IraqPundit