Loved to Death

The “climate of violence” slag oft parroted on the BBC and in the MSM appears to have either paid off for the underhanded involved in it, or must prove to the ignorant that insurgants aren’t the thoughtful, reasonable people the people in the press suppose they are:

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media,

This is rather obvious to say the least. Knowing that “world” sentiment is behind you when you’re about to maim civilians and troops probably makes the difference in the minds of those wondering if they suspect their actions might not have repercussions for them personally later in life.

The study also found that attacks increased more in parts of Iraq like Anbar province, where there is greater access to international news media, measured by the proportion of households with satellite TV, which its authors say increases the credibility of their findings.

Let’s not kid ourselves. All of this gives a certain class of people more worried about their psyches than stability a real woody:

But not the right way. Consider this: what “alliance” consists of member states that actively try to undermine each other’s dearest security initiatives, in the process endangering the lives of soldiers sent to the battlefield? This is what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war, when President Chirac and Chancellor Schroder crawled all the way to Moscow (both countries were of course, historically speaking, familiar with that road) to enlist resurgent Russia’s Vladimir Putin in their anti-American alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovitch couldn’t believe his luck. One of his central aims – destroying American hegemony – suddenly seemed within reach, with help from the inside! If he’d been paying attention, Putin would have noticed that his guests had already been pursuing the very same agenda for a number of years.

[snip]

The difference on the ground could have been enormous, as the experience of Bush senior’s Gulf War shows: a solid Euro-Atlantic coalition could have forced in more of the Arab countries as well – and made the cost for subversive action by countries like Syria and Iran much more punitive. That could have saved the Americans from dealing with a lot of crazies that were set loose in Iraq by those countries after the invasion.

And this is a result of the European model of “statesmanship”: the one where any sort of inaction is justified by waving the word “peace” around, and any other form of inaction is justified by tacitly propping up a dictator and undermining an “ally”.