AP Misleads on Iraq (Again)

The AP's headline reads "General says N. Iraq most violent region".

What else can I do but dive into Pauline Jelinek's article for the dirt...

WASHINGTON - Despite a decline in violence in Iraq, northern Iraq has become more violent than other regions as al-Qaida and other militants move there to avoid coalition operations elsewhere, the region's top U.S. commander said Monday. Army Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling said al-Qaida cells still operate in all the key cities in the north.

"What you're seeing is the enemy shifting," Hertling told Pentagon reporters in a video conference from outside Tikrit in northern Iraq.

Hertling said militants have been pushed east to his area from Anbar by the so-called Awakening movement, in which local tribes have allied with the coalition against al-Qaida. Others have been pushed north to his area from the Baghdad region, where this year's U.S. troops escalation has made more operations possible.

Nuts! All the news was too good to be true out of Iraq. We slow the terrorists down in one part of the country just to see them escalate in others. But please read on...

"The attacks are still much higher than I would like here in the north, but they are continuing to decrease in numbers and scale of attacks," he said.

Hertling said 1,830 roadside bombs were placed in his region in June, compared with 900 last month.

The U.S. military says overall attacks in Iraq have fallen 55 percent since nearly 30,000 additional American troops arrived in Iraq by June, and some areas are experiencing their lowest levels of violence since the summer of 2005.

Wait a second. I thought it was just implied that northern Iraq had gotten more violent but I suppose you have to read to paragraph four to get the truth of the matter (if you bother to read that far) after the first three paragraphs persuade you to believe otherwise.

If roadside bombs are any measurement of overall violence, northern Iraq has seen a reduction of 51%. This is not as robust as the 55% decline in overall attacks in Iraq as is reported in the article, but nothing to sneeze at either.

The AP and Pauline Jelinek are misleading the readership either intentionally or through poor writing. It would be nice to believe she is simply a poor journalist but it is hard to provide her or the AP with the benefit of any doubt when their finished product, as misleading as it is, falls precisely within the leftist narrative.

You don't suppose Harry Reid is ghost writing at the AP, do you?