Tape the war, I’ll watch it later
It’s not a new point, but it’s well made over at The Belmont Club:
Kinetic operations are now routinely shadowed by their political and information war counterparts. Death and mayhem are now props to achieve a political and media effect. Although men may shoot and kill each other in Iraq, in reality the effects both of the planned insurgent attack and the current spoiling operations are aimed squarely at Washington DC. One of the long-term legacies of the Vietnam War was to guarantee that all future campaigns resembled the Tet in that the center of gravity would be the American capital and the Western press. Radical politics, far from ending the Vietnam War, brought it home and made sure it would never leave.
And so today insurgents are planning to kill as many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians as possible — not for any military value in the classic sense of destroying combat power — but simply to grab headlines in connection with the media cycle surrounding the mid-September report to the U.S. Congress on political and military progress in Iraq. And now the US military is launching a spoiling attack to keep those headlines from splashing across the global news screens. Patton would not have understood a war in which people lived and died to put a few lines of black ink on a page.
Maybe we should replace the old antiwar slogan “what if somebody gave a war and nobody came?” with “what if somebody scheduled a made-for-media massacre and nobody covered it?” I can dream, can’t I?
Failing that, one has to rely on readers for perspective. If reports about bloodshed are the intended goal of the attacks, then surely the perpetrators — and not the armies combating them — should earn their opprobrium? When you hear hyperbole or lamentations about the bloodshed in Iraq, surely you should dismiss it for the crude propaganda it is intended as? Often, I hear the bloodshed in Iraq proves the political goals aren’t worth it. It proves just the opposite, in my view. Just as it once did in South Africa.
“Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoe making and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.” ~ Mark Twain.
Mark Twain never ceases to amaze. When you read him, only the occasional appearance of a hansom cab reminds you that you’re reading something written over a century ago. It’s almost jarring when that happens.