The News is the News

The News is the News - Powerline is always a great read. This post, on the historical context of the press' current reporting of the situation in Iraq, is above and beyond their usual high standard.

They note, correctly, that even in peacetime our military loses servicemen and women to accidental causes at a rate double the combat casualty rate in Iraq:

"At the height of the Vietnam war, to which liberals longingly compare Iraq, an average of 40 American servicemen died each day--75 times the current rate in Iraq--and fatalities in World Wars I and II were far greater still. Yet in none of these conflicts was each casualty considered front-page news.
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It has become a political commonplace to say that the continuing casualties in Iraq will, at some point, become a political problem for the Bush administration. I don't doubt that this is true, given the tone of the news coverage, which suggests on a daily or near-daily basis that every fatality is proof of the failure of our effort in Iraq.

If we ask why the minuscule combat casualty rate in Iraq receives such intense publicity, while the nearly-equal accidental death rate there is almost ignored, and accidental deaths of soldiers in other parts of the world are never reported, there can be only one answer: the focus by the American press on every combat fatality represents a conscious effort to undermine the war effort and the Bush administration. Why else this sudden concern for the well-being of the American G.I.? Why else the ritual incantation: “...the fifty-third combat death since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1”? Why else the studied refusal to put the minimal casualties in Iraq into any kind of historical context? Why else do the front-page stories on every casualty crowd out objective coverage of the great progress that has been made in Iraq in an astonishingly brief period of time?"

Well, we know the answer to that rhetorical question, right?

I have met very few media people who showed any signs of having enough interest in military history to have read a single book on the subject, much less evince any expertise in the field. If more had, more might have some means of knowing not only the historical context in which this operation has been so singular, but also the impotence (in the long term) and manipulation of the Iraqi resopnse:

The only hope of the desperate Baathists and other desperadoes loose in Iraq is that the American people will tire of the war and the reconstruction effort and go home. The withdrawal of American troops from Somalia after casualties were sustained in Mogadishu made a deep impression on the Arab world, and serves as a model for insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere. And the Baathists would like nothing better than for Iraq to be perceived as a second Vietnam.

So the Baathists kill not for military advantage but for headlines, and American reporters and editors oblige them. Is it unfair to suggest that these parties work together for a common purpose--to discredit the Iraq war and the Bush administration with the American public?

More to come.

Posted by Mitch at August 4, 2003 11:31 AM