The News Magazine of the Mysteries
Chester does a textual analysis of the Time article entitled Chasing the Ghosts and finds it larded with the following phrases:
"elusive and inexhaustible enemy"
"success" is "elusive"
"inexhaustible enemy emboldened by the US presence"
"gradual . . . erosion" in public support
"millions of Iraqis will vote on a constitution that threatens to further split the country"
"beleaguered US mission in Iraq"
"unwinnable military fight"
"series of failures"
"hardened local fighters"
"politically compromised outcome"
"dangers, dilemmas, and frustrations that still haunt the US in Iraq"
"temporary tactical gains"
"doubts about whether anything resembling victory can still be achieved"
"powerless to do anything" about atrocities
"intelligence suggests insurgents are displaying their mettle"
"This enemy is not a rabble."
"fierce resistance"
"shaken US officer"
"troops . . . embittered"
"momentum lost"
"insurgents proving so resiliant"
It's possible that the author, Michael Ware, has a certain point of view and he is certainly entitled to it. The problem I had, reading it, was with the who, what, where, when of the narrative. What really happened at Tal-Afar? Let's consider the battlefield metric of casualties. How many enemy troops died? Ware's answer is found in two places, suggestive, atmospheric and devoid of particulars.
Two weeks after the start of the offensive, the military claimed more than 200 insurgents killed.
then later
Only one blackened corpse, left rotting for days, is found. "They've even removed their dead," said a Green Beret, not really believing it himself.
The impression conveyed is that US casualties were much heavier. We almost come to know each and every one.
Eight Delta men are wounded, two so seriously that an AC-130 Spectre gunship has to give a medevac covering fire to get the wounded to a combat-hospital operating theater in time to save them. Elsewhere, an improvised explosive device detonates under a Bradley fighting vehicle, blowing off its lid and killing a young medic who, though based in the rear, had volunteered to enter the fighting fray. A few feet forward, the toll would have been worse, killing the Bradley commander and his gunner. "This is a war of inches," says a shaken U.S. officer.
And although Ware does not adopt a categorical estimate of casualties on either side, his account if used by historians of the far future to reconstruct the Battle of Tal-Afar would probably lead to something like this:
Two groups of men fought in a place called Tal-Afar about 3,532 years ago. One group of men, called 'insurgents', soundly defeated another group called Americans, and their allies the Kurds, but for reasons unclear in the manuscript fragments, the insurgents evacuated the battlefield although they could hardly be pressed by the Americans, who were apparently a people who frequently cursed, yelled and ran from place to place in fear.
That is what Ware's dispatch conveys as an account, not as an opinion piece. However, if this other fragment were found it would immediately precipitate a crisis among future scholars trying to interpret its assertions in light of what the Ware story depicted. (Hat tip: DL)
-- fragment of manuscript starts
SEC. RUMSFELD: Good afternoon, folks. As the country continues the challenging task of recovery from Hurricane Katrina, coalition forces continue to make inroads against the terrorists in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
On Sunday the people of Afghanistan voted in their second successful democratic election in less than one year. These were their provincial and parliamentary elections. Terrorists have done everything in their power to try to intimidate the millions of Afghan voters and the literally thousands, in this case of the most recent election, thousands of candidates from participating in their elections. And they failed this week, just as they failed in the successful presidential elections.
Think of it. The country that hosted Osama bin Laden, that supported training camps for al Qaeda, endured decades of civil war, Soviet occupation, drought, Taliban brutality, is now a democracy that fights terrorists instead of harboring them. The Afghan people's courage should be a stunning reminder to all of those seemingly self- confident prognosticators who foresaw an Afghan quagmire. They were not just wrong, they were harmful by making the cause seem hopeless. Let me remind you of just a few examples.
"The war effort is in deep trouble. The United States is not headed into a quagmire, it is already in one." That was The L.A. Times. That was five days before Mazar fell.
"The question was suspended like a spore in the autumn air: Are we quagmiring ourselves again?" That was The New York Times.
"Without a clear exit strategy, another generation of American servicemen may be sucked into a quagmire in a foreign land." That was, I think, the Dallas Morning News. And there were many, many others.
Thankfully, millions of Afghans were determined to prove them wrong. A determined coalition put a plan in place -- yes, there was a plan -- adjusted it as needed -- and it did need to be adjusted, as all war plans do -- and followed a steady course despite the cassandras of the West echoing the predictions of the terrorists. I mention this because many who were so quick to predict gloom on Afghanistan are today eager to toss it in on Iraq, claiming that it's hopeless. But the Iraqi people and the coalition have a plan for Iraq, just as there was a plan for Afghanistan.
Consider the following. Have the Iraqis been able to form a government that realistically incorporates the views of the various responsible factions in Iraq? Yes, they have. Have Iraqis successfully held representative elections? The answer is yes. Have they now succeeded in drafting a constitution that accords respect for individual rights? Indeed they have. Are the insurgents gaining or losing the support of the Iraqi people? President Talabani recently spoke in the United States about this. He noted that the vast majority of Iraqis, including Sunnis, want to participate in the political process and have been disgusted, and indeed, outraged by the barbarism of the extremists. Finally, despite the critics, are the Iraqi security forces growing in size and capability and allowing the Iraqi government to secure areas with coalition support? Yes, this too is happening. Iraqi security forces now number over 190,000.
Last week, for example, the people of Tall Afar were liberated from the grip of insurgents and foreign extremists who had tried to turn the city into a base of planning operations and training. A number of insurgents were caught fleeing the city dressed in women's clothing -- hardly a sign of a confident group supported by the citizenry.
-- fragment of manuscript ends
The only thing that will matter in the long run is not which opinion was better expressed, but which of these two stories was true.
31 Comments:
Great post, Wretchard!
Thanks, I needed that.
Lately I've been engaging my friends to help me understand their fervent belief in the meme: "Swift Boat Liars." I plead with them to send me one lie form the SwiftVets, somehow they don't respond. Of course, they never read or listened to anything from the Swifties, so it's a tough question. Meanwhile, mainstream media uses the phrase "Swift Boat smear" as if they were talking about a proven fact of Nature, like Gravity.
It's not just the pathetic media lying, it's our weak-minded fellow citizens choosing ignorance.
"There are none so blind as they who will not see." -- J. Swift
""The question was suspended like a spore in the autumn air: Are we quagmiring ourselves again?" That was The New York Times."
---
WoW,
I missed that one:
Quagmiring ourselves.
Sounds almost pornographic
...but it is the very Grey Lady
On her last legs.
Islamic Jihadist are our enemies; the MSM are their enablers and collaboratosr. Once upon a time enablers and collaborators were confronted but no longer, in the name of free speech and free press. It appears to me we have safeguarded the freedom to destroy ourselves.
22 days, and a wake up
The verbage used to describe the conflict in Iraq, is notinconsequential to actions on the ground. "Time" is, has been, off my reading list for years, except for online articles.
Just saw a powerful commercial on Fox about "Bush's Mistake". Mothers & Wifes of US dead. If the Admin does not create a counter narrative ... well, the mood will continue to shift anti war.
Especially after the October and December elections, in Iraq.
As I've said before, no matter the outcome, there will be enough accurate, negative news, for & about US, to spin a Jihadist Victory. The Time article W references is a prime example.
W speaks of "headhunting" and leadership decapitation as tactics against the Mohammedans.
Why not Osama?
W: - Thanks for the link!
"AC-130 Spectre gunship has to give a medevac covering fire"
Covering fire is a pretty euphemistic way to describe what happens when an AC-130 turns on it's guns.
Wretchard: It is always amazing to me that people don't pay more attention to those DoD opening statements--they're filled with fascinating stuff. For what it's worth, I think that Rumsfeld's "plan...plan...plan...plan..plan" statement, and Myers' subsequent flower-strewing story were both in specific response to Kerry's miserable speech on Monday, in which he referred to Iraq as a "sideshow adventure." And that, of course, is what the AP reports on. It's maddening.
Let us not forget the predictions of the same news media prior to the start of Desert Storm in 1991. U.S. forces were "too high tech" and would be sucked into a massive bloodletting against teh simpler armed, bayyle harddened, deeply dug in troops of Saddam.
One report by an NBC reporter (one who I actually had the chance to converse with briefly when he called our office in The Building) described how much trouble the US Army was having disengaging from the defense of West Germany and redeploying to the middle east. The reason? "Too much high tech." He did not quite yawn when he said it.
The truth was far, far different. Our excessively high tech military ripped through the Iraqis like eggs through a hen. One British reporter on NPR descibed how he looked out the window of his hotel and saw a U.S. cruise missile fly down the street, turn the corner, and hit the Iraqi Air Force headquarters building. "I think the things can stop at traffic lights." he said wonderingly.
There were no mass cries of "Boy were we ever wrong!" or investigative reports on the clueness nature of the media. One reporter, Fred Reed, said that he noticed the hacks who had been spouting the "too much high tech" line did not leave the business but were switched to other subjects.
They're Back!
These days i'm constantly in mind of one of those jokes popular in the dark days of the Soviet Union:
A guy goes to the doctor and asks him to check his eyesight. After checking, the doc tells him itsfine. so the guy then asks the doc to check his hearing. After checking, the doc reports that his hearing's fine too.
"S'funny," says the guy, "i keep hearing one thing and then seeing something completely different."
maybe dr sanity can tell us how much of this cognitive dissonance our society can take before we all go collectively round the bend?
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Yes, W. The truth eventually comes out. In the meantime, we have to deal with viral memes which could tip the balance here on the home front.
Tony highlighted the 'Swift Boat Liars,' which I've also heard dismissed conclusively as the 'debunked' Swift Boat Vets.
Same goes for the 'illegal' occupation, despite its endorsement in resolution form (IIRC) by -- all genuflect, now -- the UN.
The entire Iraq enterprise is confidently branded 'hopeless' and a 'disaster,' despite the booming economy and rapid movement toward consitutional democracy.
There are countless others.
Reading Katrina coverage worldwide, one wouldn't suspect that per capita income for African-Americans exceed that of Swedes, or that America's 'poor' are among the richest people on this planet.
As I commented in a previous thread, until recently spin was confined to highlighting the negative or lint-picking at a generally-accepted reality or stipulated facts.
Today, regardless of facts on the ground, polemecists seize on any event as 'proof of the failure of X,' or 'complete repudiations of Y.'
Thus, in this upside-down world, a free Iraq with fast-growing economy is 'undoubtedly' a 'failure,' and Katrina 'conclusively' 'repudiates' small-government conservatism.
During the Cold War, we knew state-controlled media behind the Iron Curtain lied to their captive populations about life in the West. But how many of us ever thought we’d live to see the free people of the West so deliberately and consistently deceived by a free press bent on crippling the very institutions essential to its survival.
In Time, truth is the first casualty.
Michael Ware is the same man who lived with insurgents in Fallujah only to return gushing about their indomitable seriousness, incomparable fortitude, and big, soft hands. He's a hack with an adjectival fetish.
Every American is shaken, every insurgent inexhaustible. Michael Ware's bullshit is both.
Victory in the Indian Wars (and they were wars, hard-fought and brutal) is now considered a racist extermination by the valets of modern morality. The cute brownish-red nature lovers offered the olive branch; the evil white man counteroffered the trail of tears.
In 30 years, Iraq will be a success, don't worry about that. In a 150 years, though, it will be something quite different.
I disagree on your final point. Opinion does matter because it can shape the accepted naration of the battle.
If Congress and the voters come to accept Mr. Wares opinion of events (which seems increasingly so), then they might be encouraged to quickly withdraw, or atleast cut funding, from Iraq as a lost cause; they might also come to view alternative viewpoints, like the DoD's as lies.
Thus, opinion shapes the short term view and long term outcome of the battle.
Cosmo:
"During the Cold War, we knew state-controlled media behind the Iron Curtain lied to their captive populations about life in the West. But how many of us ever thought we’d live to see the free people of the West so deliberately and consistently deceived by a free press bent on crippling the very institutions essential to its survival."
Well said
I'd apprecaite some historical perspective. It's hard to imagine in other times and places a sillier, more biased, and dangerous media, but I some how think our current crop of hacks is more the norm than the exception.
Does anyone take Time seriously aside from the hacks themselves, and the cynical media types who make a living sucking up to the media?
I suppose the rag still gets cited in high school term papers, but I wonder how many readers and former readers realize just how corrupt and intellecutally bankrupt it really is?
If we're successful in Iraq (I'm confident that we will be, but I suppose it's possible to fail even at this late juncture simply because I guess pretty much any human endeavor can fail up to the moment when it succeeds), how the history books write about it will be secondary.
Revisionist histories of the United States may dwell on the fact that Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, but they can't change the fact of the nation's existence as a result of these and other men's efforts, lives, fortunes, and honor, nor of its philosophical shape. The same will be true of Iraq: even if textbooks my grandchildren read perpetuate the Mooreian kite-flying paradise of Saddam's Iraq, a democratic Iraq allied with the US and prosperous because its government is no longer a kleptocracy will speak for itself.
In the race to the finish, it seems to me that it's a question of whether the terrorist insurgents or the LA Times/NY Times will go belly-up first. Don't forget that there are increasing evidences that both of those newspapers are in SERIOUS financial difficulties, and if they weren't being fed intravenous funding from rich liberal backers, they'd already be in bankruptcy.
If Dubya is willing to continue financing an extremely costly war to introduce democracy to the barbarians, are the George Soros's of the world willing to finance an increasingly mutated version of liberal reality on the pages of the MSM?
True enough, Nathan - it wouldn't be wise to disregard the "agenda-setting" function of the media nor the power of perception - but in the end it's more important that the Roman Empire indubitably affected the destiny of most of Europe, and by extension the British/American hegemony we see today, than that some choose to ignore all of its positive contributions in favor of its oppressions, debaucheries, and indignities.
I think the biggest problem with the misinformation campaign the media is waging is not the effect it will have on Iraq, but the effect it will have on (potential) future issues of a similar nature. It will take even more political courage than what Pres Bush had to show for a future president to take similar action. That is going to be the lasting legacy of this.
Tony, the Swift Boats will rise again because, unfortunately, the mental carnival is going to run again.
If "history is written by the winners" and we're supposedly winning, does it matter what is recounted now?
Today, it's hard for people to imagine that Lincoln didn't really want to free the slaves, for example. Historians have glossed over the real reasons for the American Civil War to depict it more as slavery vs. emancipation.
Or, for instance, people do not consider the American Revolutionaries as "insurgents", although their initial acts certainly fit the bill.
Those are just a couple American historical contexts that pop into my head at the moment. History is filled with inaccuracies, mainly due to the winner of a conflict spinning the story to their own liking.
As long as we win, the leaders of this campaign can (and do) write the "official" version however they see fit.
Opinion do matter because that is what terrorists are fighting for. Like the north vietnamese, their know victory is easiest not on the battlefield but in american living rooms.
one more thing.
I felt compelled to respond to news, published on our front page, that a teenager was forced against his will to bomb a Shi'a mosque in Iraq. The attack failed as the young man fled the scene; he later admitted to being forced to carry out this mission after being kidnapped, badly beaten and drugged by terrorists. A US military report confirmed his version of events.
He was not the only one; all terrorists are heavily sedated. They are drugged by a media, which gives credence to false stories, written according to its author’s mood, added to fabricate pictures and selected from an angle that serve the interest of terrorist groups, be it former Baath party members or Islamic extremists.
http://www.asharqalawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=1793
What a country! Something far more dangerous to the war effort than, say, Osama bin Laden, freely sells its ideas on every street-corner! Good old TIME-think...the voice of the party which runs the inner-city plantations (both above as well as below sea-level), the party which creates the conditions of wars and then will not fight them, the party forever at the barricades, storming the Bastille of American Exceptionalism.
nahncee said...
In the race to the finish, it seems to me that it's a question of whether the terrorist insurgents or the LA Times/NY Times will go belly-up first. Don't forget that there are increasing evidences that both of those newspapers are in SERIOUS financial difficulties, and if they weren't being fed intravenous funding from rich liberal backers, they'd already be in bankruptcy.
I would suggest also taking a look at such Conservative monoliths as Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Both are also propped up by their non-newspaper corporate owners due to constant financial losses.
We already see the case of the Rupert Murdochs of the world willing to finance an increasingly mutated version of conservative reality on the pages of the MSM.
Estepp:
"As long as we win, the leaders of this campaign can (and do) write the "official" version however they see fit."
Point taken. It's what happens as events slide into the past and the revisionists start working on them that concerns me.
For today's school children, WWII is less about liberation from global fascism than about dropping the bomb and the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Same goes for the U.S. torpedoing the inevitable socialist paradise by engineering destruction of the beloved Soviet Union.
Same goes for moral compromises the U.S. made during the Cold War, which are criticized in hindsight and as if they were made in a vacuum, absent the threat of a ruthless enemy who observed no rules and was sworn to our destruction.
To paraphrase John Derbyshire, our children are being taught that their nation was founded and is run by criminals, their parents are liars and dupes, and their culture is a fraud.
I haven't seen the Wall Street Journal laying off any employees. I'm also not seeing the WSJ trying various different ways of enticing people to spend more money on pseudo-new programs like the NY Times has just started, and the LA Times has just stopped because *no one* signed up for it!
It seems to me that a barometer of reality might be who/what the majority of the American public are choosing to pay attention to. And right now, and increasingly, that is *not* the NY Times nor the LA Times, while the WSJ is maintaining at least an even keel, and may even be expanding its readership via the internet.
For anyone to compare the WSJ and the bruised, bleeding, battered and thoroughly rejected MSM is another example of LLL denial and wishful thinking of the same kind that tells us that a crazed fishwife like Cindy Sheehan should be listened to because ... just because.
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Victor Davis Hanson writes on how our newspapers create opinion and report it. He then elaborates:
.
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http://victorhanson.com
A similar theme is echoed in Wretchard's post. This is all well and fine, but the fact remains. The big News networks dictate the initiative and the narrative, and as long as you're reacting to it, we've fallen dupe to their trap. You've become a consumer of their product. I don't care for anything that has AP, Reuters, NYT, AFP, CNN, BBC, CBC, CBS, ABC, etc., labeled on it. These filthy outfits have no credibility and allure for me, and I'm sure many others like me. Why force our faces onto that dirty shopwindow?
nahncee, if you really believe the WSJ is doing so well without resorting to "trying various different ways of enticing people to spend more money on pseudo-new programs" , then I would highly suggest reading last week's The Economist
Here is the printable link (since the online contect requires registration):
http://www.economist.com/business/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4408124
Quick synopsis:
ON SATURDAY September 17th, Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, launches a new “Weekend” edition of the newspaper in America. It is a risky move, coming in the middle of an advertising slump and a fierce debate over the company's strategy and the quality of its management. If the new Saturday edition fails to attract a healthy amount of additional advertising, its chief executive, Peter Kann, a distinguished former journalist, may be pushed out before he is due to retire in three years' time. It is even possible that the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, may decide to sell the firm. Last month the company's shares rose 15% following unconfirmed reports that some family members want to sell.
Because of particularly sharp declines in technology and financial advertising, the Wall Street Journal'sdivision of the company is barely profitable this year, despite being the leading business newspaper in the world, with some of the wealthiest readers.
The new paper will include articles on health and fitness, cars, travel, fashion, food, gadgets, entertainment and shopping.
Dow Jones's management has been under pressure for years. The company's shares have underperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 49% in the past ten years, and the Standard & Poor's printing and publishing index by 56%. It is true that most newspapers are struggling with the internet's impact on advertising. What Mr Kann should be blamed for, his critics say, is the company's strategic failure since he took over in 1991 to broaden its mix of assets. Many shareholders and analysts, including Ms Fine, would welcome a change of management.
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