Who is the enemy?

I'm just going to cut and paste the whole thing. From James Taranto's Best of the Web:

"Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable 'emboldenment effect' on insurgents there," United Press International reports:

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, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq." . . .

In Iraqi provinces that were broadly comparable in social and economic terms, attacks increased between 7 percent and 10 percent following what the researchers call "high-mention weeks," like the two just before the November 2006 election.

The study is here. One possible objection is the way the study counts "emboldening" statements (see pp. 9-10):

We construct an automated mentions count of potentially "emboldening" statements reported in major U.S. news outlets, which we define as the number of times top Bush administration officials--the President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Press Secretary, and the U.S. commander [in] Iraq--refer to statements or actions by other U.S. political figures that might encourage violent extremist groups in Iraq. This strategy provides an objective mechanism to classify what constitutes an emboldening or resolve-undermining statement or action.

This is probably the best the authors could do. There is no way to count "emboldening" statements directly; the definition invariably would be subjective and the count incomplete. But by relying on characterizations of Bush administration officials (and the commander in Iraq), they leave open the possibility that it is those characterizations, rather than the statements being characterized, that embolden terrorists in Iraq. In addition to "emboldening" statements, the authors also find a correlation between the release of major U.S. opinion polls about Iraq and violence there.

On a related note, the New York Times reports that the media aren't paying as much attention to Iraq as they used to:

Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The drop in coverage parallels--and may be explained by--a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq "very closely" in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall.

"May be explained by"? What about "may explain"? The Web notwithstanding, most people are still fairly passive consumers of news and are likely to follow stories less closely if there's less news about them.

But here's another possible explanation: News organizations, by and large, are biased against American success in Iraq, as illustrated by this crass bit of editorializing from the Associated Press:

Fresh off his eighth Iraq visit, Sen. John McCain declared Monday that "we are succeeding" and said he wouldn't change course--even as the U.S. death toll rose to 4,000 and the war entered its sixth year.

That "even as" clause is the reporter's opinion, not McCain's. Yet while this sort of thing still goes on, journalists have paid less attention to Iraq over the past year as the "surge" has succeeded in reducing violence. If the Harvard study is right, we may be looking at a virtuous circle: Less violence means less media coverage, which in turn means less violence.

Perhaps one day we'll wake up to discover that America won the war in Iraq months earlier, but no one noticed because the reporters were all busy with other things.