[URL]http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/04/beck.iraq/index.html[/URL]
[B]NEW YORK (CNN)[/B] -- Perhaps it was the mental stress of preparing for a book tour in which she had to sell a marriage-destroying affair as a heartwarming memory. But before her book was released, Barbara Walters had this to say to Elisabeth Hasselbeck about Iraq on "The View" on April 8, 2008: [B]Hasselbeck[/B]: I think the surge has probably been one of the most effective strategies in this war. [B]Walters[/B]: No, it has not. [B]Hasselbeck[/B]: Oh, I disagree I think it absolutely has. [B]Walters[/B]: I think a few weeks ago it was considered that. Now there has been more violence than there has been in many months. First of all, a "few weeks" of an upturn in violence shouldn't negate "many months" of progress. But was Barbara Walters even right? Looking at the site icasualties.org provides the answers. There had been a short-term spike in violence, but only compared with already significantly decreased post-surge levels. Even with this spike, in the three weeks prior to her comments, coalition troop death rates had fallen by 62 percent from the previous May and were lower than the average rate of every previous year of the war. With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and ask: Was this really a sign of an upcoming turn for the worse in Iraq? The following month after Walter's comments, May 2008, held the lowest rate of troop fatalities of any month since the beginning of the war -- as they decreased by 84 percent since the same month a year earlier. I'm not sure if Hasselbeck received an apology. This is not to say that Iraq won't become more violent -- the situation is still delicate. And, I'm not trying to beat up on Barbara Walters, she herself pointed out that she's no expert on these matters, and she's surely a legendary journalist. But she's not alone in trying to dismiss the successes of the surge with such certainty and such lack of evidence. It seems that for so many in the media and elsewhere, there is an incredible desire to find the negative. It's an unquenchable thirst. How else could an essentially fired former press secretary's questionable claims about the war be more important to cover than improvement in the actual war? [B]Don't Miss[/B]
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