Iraq and Afghanistan

The mainstream media (NY Times, CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, etc...) has utterly and completely failed to understand Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a closer correspondence between reality and their reporting, now, I still have absolutely no confidence that the media will adequately report on what's occurring in these critical regions of the world. Their level of incompetence has cost the American people money and lives. Their incompetence is even more reprehensible given that they have now had so much time to figure things out.

From initially allowing General Clark to use CNN as a podium from which to run for President, to utterly failing to explain or understand the complex relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper's mindless biases against McCain, Bush, the Republicans, and the Iraq War in general, to the completely inadequate coverage of China and Russia's involvement in the Middle East, the mainstream media has been abysmally bad.

I actually think that, while they are biased, it is the media's incompetence, more than bias, that has caused me such agony.

An example:
Once, in about 2004, on a mainstream national TV network, I heard a story which appeared to describe an Iraqi in Kirkuk lamenting the fact that Americans were "killing Arabs" and ranting about how much the Arabs "feared the Americans." I remember being struck by the man's facial expressions; he seemed almost to be delighting in describing the alleged carnage. Then, I started listening more closely to his voice (which was nearly inaudible, because of the voice-over translation). When I did succeed in picking out the original speaker's voice, I realized - he wasn't speaking Arabic! He was a Kurd, and he was speaking Kurdish (which sounds more like Farsi). The story that was allegedly about an Iraqi man lamenting the killing of his own kind was actually about a Iraqi Kurd nearly rejoicing in the restoration of parts of Kirkuk to the Kurds after years of a policy of genocidal arabization at the hands of Sunni Arabs.

Completely apart from the veracity of the report (which I doubt) or the motivations of the interviewee (of which I am suspicious), the most troubling thing was that the big cable network, with its legion of analysts and reporters and producers and translators, had no idea what it was reporting. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. I have heard so many cases of ignorant reporting that confuses who lives where, who gets along with whom, and who did what to whom when, that I see no point in watching the mainstream TV media's coverage of the Iraq War.

Why does it matter that the media is so bad? It matters because it results in the deaths of Americans, unnecessary expenditures from the American coffers, and damage to the prestige of the United States abroad.

Rather than ignoring the Iraq War now, as both the domestic and foreign media are doing, they should be evaluating why they were so wrong. The answers are quite obvious, but they are nonetheless failing to do so. The media's expectations that the war would be over quickly were largely created by... the media themselves. Did you know that the term Shock & Awe was misapplied by the media? Not only was the media reffering to the Iraq campaign as a shock & awe campaign inaccurately, because it wasn't one, but nobody in the military really said it was. There is a scant amount of evidence that, once, an anonmymous government official said that the strategy to be employed was "based on" schock & awe, but that's it. In fact, General McKiernan's christening of the 3rd Army's plan "Cobra II" directly disputes the idea that the campaign was planned as a "shock & awe" campaign. Anyone who knows any military history understands that Operation Cobra was not about shock & awe, even in an abstract or metaphorical sense.

If the media had, from the outset, recognized how far we were from "winning" the war in Afghanistan (which, early on, the media seemed happy to declare finished), and also had realistic expectations for how long it takes to occupy and rebuild a country (Iraq), the US government would not have been so paralyzed. All the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam tied the US Government's hands. Sending more troops to Iraq, exactly what was needed in about 2004/2005, but was not accomplished until 2007, was seem as political suicide because the media had portrayed such a strategy as an admission of defeat and similarity to Vietnam, which it was not, and would not have been. In fact, even though that strategy has worked, it's delay by and portrayal in the media until the last few months, cost President Bush dearly and will quite possibly have cost McCain the election in a few more days. I do blame Bush, to some extent, for not simply doing it anyway, sooner, even though the media, and therefore the country, was likely to completely misinterpret it.

McCain, however, championed it from the beginning. Obama, for his part, still seems unaware that it has worked, why it worked, or what should follow.

Had the media correctly assessed Afghanistan to be more like Vietnam (which is so obviously within their grasp because in the 80s the very same American media referred to the Soviet's troubles there as the USSR's Vietnam), people around the world would be conceding that the US was right on Iraq all along and would be fretting about what to do in Afghanistan. Instead, most of the people in this country and around the world are still complaining about Iraq and ignoring Afghanistan. While all you spoon-fed CNN lovers have been sitting around gobbling up the ignorance, did you realize that more American soldiers died this month in Afghanistan than in Iraq?

Don't delay another day. Start admitting, right now, that you were wrong about Iraq. It may have taken longer than it could have. It did not go as smoothly as it could have. Too many people died. But, the strategy, eventually, started to work. What you should have been spending your time complaining about, all along, was the failure in the strategy employed in Afghanistan. But, you wasted your time, and now we're JUST STARTING, as a nation, to understand what's happening in Afghanistan. Your ignorance, much like the media's, is responsible, to some degree, for the number of American soldiers dying in Afghanistan today and the lack of support for that war by the Europeans.