On Tue, 25 May 2004 21:44:59 +0100, Alan Lothian
wrote:

Never mind that, Mr Brooks. It is appallingly apparent that the US, for
reasons that are not at all clear, is screwing things up in Iraq. It
was never going to be easy (as G Bush said himself, in what I snipped
above). Now I know as a matter of personal experience that the US is
by no means unsupplied with intelligent and indeed honourable officers
and NCOs: what the hell is going wrong?

Asymmetrical warfare requires asymmetrical media coverage.

The axiomatic assumptions that requires are firmly in place - notice
things like the relative coverage of weapons found in mosques in
Najaf, or the suicide bomber-belts discovered in Falluja, i.e. none.

This is a victim-culture bonanza, with the media shoe-horning
everthing into their pre-existing shorthand cliches of "Palestinian
intifada" and "Vietnam quagmire". We're in the land of hysteria and
hyperbole, with every Iraqi an innocent victim (even those
volley-firing rocket-propelled grenades from ambulances and
suicide-bombing the UN) and every American a brutal,
firepower-addicted oppressor.

The Abu Ghraib thing was
disgusting, but the US Army is in the midst of cleaning out its own
house (although the cost of those shameful digital photos will yet be
paid by honest troopers in the future); what about the several
nonsenses around Fallujah? Political **** showering combat commanders?

Actually, for once the US commanders deserve some credit for trying to
sort out something on the ground that came short of decisive military
action to conquer the town, with all the catastrophic political damage
that would have caused. On the other hand, the failure of the US
forces as a whole to grasp the importance of avoiding alienation of
the local population, no matter how irrational and prejudiced those
locals might be, is a real failure. Couple that to the idiotic
slackness about post-war planning, and the institutional arrogance
that "we don't do occupations" (well, you should have learned before
embarking upon the occupation of 25 million Iraqis...) and there are
plenty of grounds for legitimate criticism of the American approach.
But not as much as could reasonably sustain the mass of critical
reporting that actually surrounds their efforts.

I don't know, but none of it looks good. And in that part of the world,
as in many others, how you look can be as important as how you do.

The wedding party.... well, if Iraqis in what is still something of a
war zone will insist on their fireworks, they shouldn't be entirely
surprised if the shooting is misinterpreted. Even so, clumsy is the
best that can be said for the Good Guys.

Take a long, hard look at the stats of who is killing who, Alan. The
media perspective is "American military repression": the dead are
revealing that the real story is Iraqis killing each other. But they
generally don't meet the demands of media preconceptions, and so they
get airbrushed out of the picture.

Iraqis killing Iraqis? Quick, blame the Americans.

I've been staggered by the extent to which media coverage has simply
amounted to the media satisfying their own wihsful thinking, whether
al Jazeera acting as the mirror of Arab prejudices about the
intolerability of American violence against fundamentalist thugs and
the invisibility of Iraqi responsibility for anything that happens; or
British and American newspapers slavishly sucking up staged photos of
soldiers abusing or raping Iraqis. The Amnesty and ICRC reports are a
good case in point: try and compare the coverage of successful
reconstruction and aid efforts with the Abu Ghraib frenzy. Now, I'm
not arguing that one cancels out the other, but this does seem to be
the media position which can't address anything other than American
excesses and abuses to the exclusion of all else.

The last I heard was that civilian deaths in the past year were
estimated at 10,000, or 60,000 less than Saddam was believed to murder
on an average yearly basis according to the last HRO/NGO report I
read. That doesn't excuse Anglo-American errors and abuses, but it
does raise serious questions about the sense of proportion and moral
credibility of pundits who think that the current situation, bad as it
is, is similar or worse to what happened under Saddam.

Gavin Bailey

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