Alan Lothian wrote in message ...
In article , Presidente
Alcazar wrote:

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.

Well, we certainly have that, as you go on to point out. My own belief
is that television journalism, even under far more rigorous editorial
regimes than we see today, is *inherently* dishonest. A good moving
image can *steal* a thousand words. That there is real and active
dishonesty out there just makes things worse.

I very much fear, Gavin, that there's going to be a lot of tiresome
agreement in what follows.


snippaggio

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.

And Looniemouth Flakjacket, wearing a Shirt of Many Pockets, reporting
from just outside a booze-filled hotel "near the front". Looniemouth
Flakjacketess is even worse.

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,

And this is where I find myself worrying rather more seriously than
about irresponsible and often downright lying meeja hype. I also worry
(private sources) about gunship attacks on radar-tracked mortar-launch
sites in Baghdad, to name but one.

And I worry a lot about the sort of stuff that notorious pinko leftie
loonie TMO picked up on here a week or two ago; small numbers of combat
troops with the obligation to defend a huge logistics tail, and
shamelessly competing agencies trying to control the whole ****aree.


no matter how irrational and prejudiced those
locals might be, is a real failure. Couple that to the idiotic
slackness about post-war planning,

Quite.

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.

Quite squared.

snip

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.

Sure, but perhaps more to the point: US forces in Iraq, that is, combat
troops (in fact I think the figures work if you include every
hamburger-tosser and supply-truck driver) compared with the population
are far, far fewer than the British Army in NI. And we all know how
problem-free that game was.

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.

A very real problem in both the US and the UK is the lack of not only
politicos but also journalists with any military experience or indeed
any willingness to learn. Compare and contrast the nasty stories that
came out of the Korean war, with the nonsenses we see now. Consider
(just one among many possible examples) the meeja's idea of "heavy
fighting".


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.

I happen to know (private sources, but there are plenty public ones if
you look around; and you certainly do have to look around, which makes
your point) that a lot of good people are actually out there trying to
reconstruct the **** out of the place, but the "abuses and excesses"
are not all meeja imagination. The importation of all manner of neo-sub
Schwarznegger "security consultants" being just one example. You really
don't need guys with major dick problems walking around with
fluorescent "Shoot Me!" signs on their foreheads.
More important, there does seem to be a lack of what might be called
grip, which undoubtedly reflects TMO's point about competing agencies.
In that sense, at least, there are Vietnam resonances.

But not otherwise. This thing simply cannot fail; the consequences
would be utterly appalling, and I wish gloating meejists would realise
it. But they're careerists, wannabee celebs. You can't expect much from
someone whose idea of integrity is a fully-functioning gold Amex card.

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.

Quite cubed.

competing agencies, the US Department of Justice has opened up a
potential battleground with the Department of Homeland Security by
means of the weapon of choice, Television. Yesterday the Attorney
General flanked by one tall and one short bozo proceeded to announce
the need to find seven people who have been known as al Qaeda members
since at least 1998. They may or may not be in the US, one commentator
on this morning's TV said he saw at least 12 of them while coming to
work in New York. "Nation in peril" is a a good rallying cry if you
have nothing more to offer, warmed over stale news fills the 24-7
schedule as well anything of value.