1115.org

Our premier news organizations, of course, have a crystal clear mission: to bring us the news, all the news and nothing but. No spin, no opinion (unless it’s explicitly labeled as such); just the news. This is, of course, particularly true of the wire services.

Here’s the news that AP and Reuters brought us Sunday morning.

Let’s do this alphabetically, and let AP go first. The headline reads: “Rice visit to Iraq intended to promote gains“. And backing that up:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said her latest trip to Iraq on Sunday is intended to promote fresh political gains she says are flowing from government-led assaults on radical militias.
[…]
Rice told reporters she sees signs that al-Maliki’s assaults on militia forces in Basra last month have brought sectarian and ethnic groups together in an unprecedented way. She said she wants to capitalize on that cohesion.

Both Rice and AP were punctilious about differentiating between political gains and security gains:

En route to Iraq, Rice told reporters traveling with her that she is not trying to make a point about security gains in Iraq by visiting now.

“I think everybody knows it is still a dangerous place,” she said aboard her plane.

Everybody apparently doesn’t know that it’s sophistry to separate political gains from security gains in Iraq. It’s the political strife that leads to all the internecine killing, the very uncivil war that’s been going on in Iraq ever since we stirred it up.

Let’s check in on Reuters now. Their headline points to to the fragile reality on the ground: “Rice in Iraq after Sadr’s “open war” threat“. Our Condi would like us to believe that’s a security threat but a political gain?

And it’s not just dueling headlines:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Baghdad on Sunday to strengthen the Iraqi government’s efforts to isolate Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has threatened an “open war” on security forces.

Underscoring the threat of widening violence, the U.S. military said it killed 20 militiamen overnight in clashes in the cleric’s Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City. A military spokesman called it the capital’s “hottest night” in weeks.

Do “fresh political gains” usually manifest themselves in a “threat of widening violence”?

Rice, who went straight into a meeting with Maliki, arrived a day after Sadr threatened an uprising against the U.S.-backed government if it did not halt attacks on his followers. The populist anti-American cleric launched two uprisings in 2004.

Rice did not have any immediate comment on Sadr’s threat.

Of course she didn’t; that would have meant deviating from her script. Why waste a perfectly good script? Especially when brand name news organizations can be counted on to faithfully trot it out for you? The fact that it’s some and not all must rankle, but somebody somewhere is surely working on that.

*** Update, 6:20 am ***

Apparently, they put on a little demonstration yesterday for Condi, during her visit to the Green Zone, so that she could speak from experience about how much progress we have made in Iraq:

A ceremony at which she unveiled a plaque commemorating civilian deaths in the Green Zone was briefly delayed by a “duck and cover” alert, one of several during her six-hour visit to the fortified compound housing the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government.

The first of three rocket attacks occurred while she was meeting with Maliki at his office. In the second attack, as she returned to the Green Zone from a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a rocket struck in an area between the embassy and the main U.S. dining facility. A U.S. official said two people were injured.

The third attack came as Rice was completing a tour of the tactical operations center in the embassy on her way to the ceremony. Those waiting for her to appear took shelter in hallways until the all-clear was sounded, while Rice stayed in the operations center and watched tracking screens indicating the rocket’s launch site in Sadr City and its trajectory.