'While nobody contests the US assertion that the security situation has improved a great deal, it is clearly neither perfect, universal nor irreversible.'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7239931.stm
What is this editorialising doing in the middle of a BBC report about the surge? If we were in court, some lawyer would be saying right now 'Objection: calls for speculation, prediction rather than the statement of fact'. I presume that if peace and quiet are 'reversible' in Iraq, they are also reversible in Belgium, Burkina Faso and Bangladesh. Sadly, peace is reversible everywhere. Thats why we have armies and police forces. A favourite debating technique is to pretend that something normal is extraordinary.
Take for instance this:
'More than 30,000 people have been killed since the PKK began fighting for a Kurdish homeland in south-eastern Turkey in 1984.'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7258323.stm
This is another story on the BBC website today. Bombs go off in south-eastern Turkey all the time, indeed often in the capital Ankara as well, planted by desperate and angry Kurds. Does the BBC website then posit that the Turkish state is under threat, and the Turkish government incapable of doing anything about that violence? No it doesn't. For the good reason that neither is true. Voilence in Iraq is normal, at least to the extent that many areas still have bodies of men determined to cause trouble if they can do so without dying, and a state which is only becoming capable of policing all its territory right now, in these present days and weeks.
Structrual bias ruins the body politic. It does so by hiding the true state of the world from peoples eyes, day after day, story after story.
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