I'm disgusted with the coverage of Al-Zarqawi's death, which focuses obsessively on how meaningless it is and how it will do little if nothing to make a difference in the President's war for oil. Oh, by the way, try telling that to the wildly celebrating Iraqis. The worst I heard was an NPR blip reporting the news from Zarqawi's hometown, as if he were an ordinary dead celebrity. It seems to me that the Press has lost all perspective on how to report a war.
In the old days, from what I gather, wars were reported by telling about troop movements, battle fronts, and battle outcomes. Victories (on our side) were celebrated, defeats (on our side) were mourned. The enemy was the enemy, and we didn't go to a mass murderer's home town to hear about how some people were sad that he died — and if we did, we'd hear about it with the appropriate level of disdain.
The press nowadays brings two mentalities to the war, both of which make for obscene war coverage: The first is a complete hostility to the war itself, which destroys any objectivity in its reporting. The second is a hopelessly parochial viewpoint, stemming from the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality in local news. Reporters are unable to distinguish enemy deaths from American deaths, they're unable to distinguish ideologies, they know nothing about warfare, they have no sense of history or geography — they operate from a complete basis of ignorance.
They're also completely uninformed about the psychology of the region and believe everything told them. This last is exceptionally stupid, because the region is a hotbed of lies. Many of the lies are intentional propaganda (and explicitly stated Al Qaeda tactic), and the press makes itself a collective useful idiot by blithely reporting everything at face value (which is why I'm reserving all judgment on Haditha).
Other lies are cultural. This is a culture that (a) tells people what they want to hear and (b) lies to save face. With regard to the first, the Iraqis have figured out that the media people they meet want to hear bad news and anger, so they oblige. It was common knowledge in the old days amongst Westerners dealing with Arabs that you never took such things at face value. If you asked an Arab "Is your father very old?" the Arab, assuming that great age was something that would impress you, would promptly answer "yes, he's very, very, old," regardless of the man's age.
As for the lies to save face, if you don't believe me, check out King Hussein's memoirs. I have to admit that I haven't read them personally, but one facet of them came in for heavy analysis in Raphael Patai's seminal book, The Arab Mind.
So, as I said, I'm disgusted with the media generally, because of its routine hostile editorializing and credulity, and I'm disgusted with reporters specifically for their inability to recognize and rejoice that a very, very evil person is wandering disconsolate in the afterlife, wondering where the heck those virgins are. (Or, even better, is suffering in some Hieronymous Bosch type environment). And so, as I promised in the title of this post, I'm going for inane, rather than obscene. Here's inane:
A Missouri woman has been arrested for breaking into a dog breeder's home and beating her repeatedly over the head with a dead Chihuahua.
Now, I happen to like Chihuahuas, thinking them a much maligned breed, but that's still a funny opening line for a news report.
Talking to Technorati: Al-Zarqawi, Media, War reporting, Chihuahuas
Filed under: Anti-war, Iraq, Media matters
Even the righty-blogs are minimizing the impact, but they’re doing it out of fear of over-stating the case, and later having to apologize again should the war drag on. MSM and lefty-blogs are doing what you’ve accused them of — and one thing more.
It’s a close cousin to your statement that they hate the war. They hate and do not understand the military. This means they neither understand the role or plight or accomplishments of the grunt soldier, nor the grand strategies, nor the viability of the practice of war as a problem-solver. It’s unusual for a reporter or a lefty to have a friend who’s a soldier, so their level of understanding is minimal, and they have no desire to deepen it.
Check out the comments at blackfive.com. The military is throwing a party or will soon. Retired military and active duty. The Iraqis are perhaps even more joyous. This is the man that they saw as eluding their justice, this is the man that was the face and hand behind the deaths of their children and women.
The point that the so called “multiculturalists” are in fact parochial, is very apt. I realized this once I had studied Japanese culture, and started using some of it online and the fake liberals would come back with charges of brutality, violence, and etc. towards my character. A simple comparison with how multiculturalists treat other cultures, filled in the gaps.
A real multicultural system takes in the strengths of a foreign culture and dilutes the weaknesses with a base solution. This creates a hybrid stronger than the individual component cultures added together.
The rednecks aren’t on the Right anymore, to me. They have somehow teleported. This ain’t an American thing either. Just take a look at my recent blog post about Probligo to see that Australians, New Zealander’s and the rest of the West is equally affected by parochialism.
True cosmopolitanism in a person is a trait worth its weight in gold. In this sense, the military is much much more cosmopolitan than the French, the UN, ABC/CBS/AP, or Hollywood are. Marines usually have tours in Japan, Korea, Europe, Philliphines, and more. They learn culture and people face to face, powered by full immersion. The Iraq experience has broadened this, because combat presents a new motivation factor for the soldiers to get to know the people they are stationed with.
There is a lot of contempt from the Left, the fake liberals, and Hollywood against the military for being classless, tasteless, and village orientated brutes. Crude caricatues of high society material, they may think.
But the truely self-confident person, a person who is true to himself, feels no contempt for his inferiors and no envy for his superiors. For he or she is centered, and content, and the rages of passion and emotion can no longer pull at that person as the winds of fate dictate. A martial arts application, from the East.
In response to Laer.
I knew nothing about the military except what I saw while watching Black Hawk Down, on 9/11. Zero. Well, if you don’t count all those episodes Hollywood produced for tv, which showed the military arresting, brutalizing, and oppressing civilians who just wanted to be “free” you know.
David Weber, John Ringo, Sun Tzu, hours spent a few weeks there or here studying the Civil War and other historical wars, catching various programs on the History Channel, have contributed now after 5 years, to me, an above average understanding of military affairs.
Just reading Sun Tzu provided no real understanding, just as when I first read Romeo and Juliet I did not understand the full impact or tragedy. There has to be other things you have to know first, to fully comprehend such things as what Sun Tzu wrote about. Such a thing as simple as “it is best to win wars without fighting” becomes infinitely complex when you try to apply it, as Clausewitz noticed. All simple things in war, become hard due to friction or otherwise known as the fog of war.
Knowing the ranks of the Marines and the Navy and the Army, those things are superficial. Insurgent warfare is not even conventional war, which means Clausewitz did not cover it, however Sun Tzu did. His wars back then were so old it had never had a “convention” to obey. The media faces an onion effect which gets harder and harder as they reach the core. First they have to understand the military, then they have to understand strategy, tactics, and logistics. Then they have to combine it into an understanding of conventional warfare, either infantry or armored column warfare. Then they have to translate this into insurgency warfare, which is neither here or there.
Military Science is not an advanced degree for nothing. Clausewitz’s final work was so huge, I haven’t even started in on it yet.
But al-Zarqawi was mourned in Anbar province.
“This a great loss for all the Sunnis,” 40-year-old Abid al-Duleimi said. “If they killed al-Zarqawi, more than one al-Zarqawi will replace him.”
One thing the media is competent at, and it is propaganda. You don’t need military science to know how to use propaganda and deception. You can depress people without knowing how to kill as well, even if the effects are the same.
Morale is the key, it is the Keystone to the ability to win wars without having to fight, kill, lay siege, or squander your resources. Break the enemy’s morale, and the fight is over. If the morale of your forces are broken, you might as well give up since your soldiers definitely have.
Because the media knows propaganda, PR, deception, and glitz, they know how to affect the morale of the American people. But the media has no knowledge of military affairs, so they do NOT know how to affect the morale of insurgents or of the enemy. Thus, the media, which is sort of like a bully, picks on the weaker more available target rather than the tough, dangerous, gang member.
Despite the MSM’s insistence that the American people do indeed ‘think?’ the Iraq mission is fruitless, I suspect the truth is more complex. You write of the disinformation the media creates. Public opinion is certainly influenced by it. Congress shamefully swings by it.
New technologies, effects such as the blogosphere, have begun topermeate most aspects of American life. So, even if the American citizen hears network anchors/NYT, he is aware of the presence of outside information sources. They will have a part to play in how the large aspect of this waris played.
Hugh Hewitt links to Confederate Yankee’s take of more outside-the-box documentary due from the Iraq front. It sounds as if “It will NOT be READY for The Mainstream Media.”
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http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/180494.php
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The way I see it, jg, is that the blogosphere is fighting a true guerrila war, cell based and hit and run, against the legacy media’s bigger more powerful propaganda appartus.
The blogosphere is the underdog, the legacy media the occupation forces. The truth is more complex, because it encompasses every single individual conscience and molecule of matter in the known universe. So what you have is like 2 wars on two different metaphysical planes of existence, fighting on two different fronts.
You have the propaganda war, where the enemy has the upper hand. Then you have the actual war, the killing and the blowing up of people, where the United States and our allies have the advantages of training, nerve, skills, wealth, firepower, technology, and size.
When people tell you that the “enemy” is so weak and what not, because we have bombs and they can only use suicide bombers, they’re just using another deception ploy.
The reason why the full might of the United States is taking 3 to 4 years to crush an insurgency in a nation with the pop of 25 mil, is because of what Napoleon said. Morale is to the physical, as is 3 is to 1. Full understanding of that requires some context.
To take it literally, it takes 3 hits with an axe to equal one successful hit on someone’s mind. The mind will break under one hit, the body will break under 3. So now you know. If the enemy has the advantage in morale manipulation, then regardless of how much conventional firepower we have, we have to be 3 times as good. We have to hit them 3 times for every 1 time they hit us. And amazingly enough, the US military does it. Not only that, but they exceed the minimum quota of victories.
This reminds me of the Peloponesian War, if i hadn’t mentioned this here before. Sparta had an elite phalanx force, while Athens had a superior Navy. Sparta only beat Athens, when Sparta beat the Athenian navy with a spartan built navy. To cut the story short.
The US will win, absolutely, once we gain the advantage in the propaganda war. The terroists will never, never, gain the advantage in the conventional war. Because guerrilas and terroists, never win, until they can build a conventional military force that can beat off the enemy. The United States Revolutionary Guerrilas lead by Washington, did just that. So what they want, is just to kick our conventional forces out, so they don’t have to fight them, cause they know they can never beat us at that warfare. So we have to leave, for them to win.
Now let’s apply this to the blogosphere and the propaganda war. If the terroists and the insurgents can’t win unless they can somehow get rid of our conventional force, then this applies to the propaganda war as well when the US is the underdog.
We must either get rid of the mSM propaganda apparatus, or we need to become superior at propaganda than the MSM and terroists combined.
That is the winning strategy, reduced down to fundamentals that removes any need to have a military background. It explains the why, in a way that is different than saying “stay the course” or “we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up”.
Bush is emphasizing the third option I did not mention. You can use shock troops to fight your wars for you, conventional or propaganda based, morale or physical. Bush is betting that the Iraqis can fight both the terroists propaganda wise and conventional wise. Bush is right. But America isn’t going to win the war on terrorism without doing what I have described here. Winning Iraq is one battle amongst a sea of battles. It is D-Day, it is a toe-hold in enemy territory.