An interesting op-ed piece from the NY Post. It mirrors my feelings exactly.
--------------------------
Media Fogby John Podhoretz
March 26, 2003 --
OK, let's get the official wartime caveats out of the way: One casualty is too many. War is hell.
Now let's get the official personal caveats out of the way: No, I have never served in the military and I am not "embedded" anywhere except in Brooklyn after midnight.
With these caveats in mind, let me now say that an elementary understanding of the history of warfare ought to convince anyone that the war for Iraq has been going brilliantly - and that anyone who seriously argues otherwise has a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda for making that argument.
Here's the evidence for brilliance. The war has been under way for five days. In that time, U.S. and British forces have moved into Iraq with a speed unheard-of in the annals of war, as tens if not hundreds of thousands of troops have traveled almost 400 miles to the outskirts of Baghdad.
As of this writing, the United States has suffered 17 fatal casualties. Just for simple comparison's sake, a single infantry division saw more than 500 killed in action in the first three days of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. At the Civil War battle of Antietam, 5,000 Americans died in just four hours' fighting in a single trench called Bloody Lane.
A handful of Americans has been taken prisoner. The United States and Britain are holding 3,000 Iraqis as prisoners of war. The most horrible incident of the war so far was a grenade attack by a berserk U.S. soldier - an event that has nothing whatever to do with the order of battle or the nature of the fighting.
The allied forces have complete "air dominance." As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted yesterday, the Iraqis haven't even tried to send up a single aircraft against our troops. This is important, because there's little way for Iraq to cause large-scale casualties without air power of some kind.
Nonetheless, the questioning by the media in Qatar and at the Pentagon in the past four days has been almost entirely skeptical in nature. These questions, culled from two days of briefings by Central Command in Doha, offer a sense of the spirit of the press covering the war:
* "Why has there not been such mass surrenders as you had in 1991 so far?"
* "Are you facing a new Vietnam in Iraq, or are you victims of over-self-confidence?"
* "There was a British general today who said that you guys might be in Baghdad by late Monday or early Tuesday. Does that seem wildly optimistic now, in view of the resistance you're getting, or not?"
* "Nobody thought this was going to be simple, but, given the degree of resistance, which I think you concede has been unexpected - the level of casualties, now the prisoners of war - is it not the case that this is proving to be significantly more difficult than you might have hoped?"
* "Why do you think there hasn't been more mass surrender?"
* "Well, isn't the Iraqi opposition, the stubbornness and persistence of it, forcing you in places to fight on their terms, where you have far less technological advantage? And might this make you have to pay less regard to the risk of civilian casualties?"
* "I know we're in a very early stage of this, but I guess the question is beginning to be asked if the commanders have somewhat underestimated the tenacity of some of these irregular units - the Fedayeen and the Special Republican Guard."
There isn't a single question here that's illegitimate. But the overwhelming emphasis on the negative aspects of the war so far is a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the events on the ground.
The spirit of depressed solemnity taken by the anchors at the major networks (Aaron Brown, please take your Prozac) only adds to the impression of a conflict gone bad.
But while it is a terrible sorrow that Americans have been taken prisoner - and a horror that their treatment violates the Geneva Convention - the focus on the victims of war and their families takes away from the heroism and bravery of those who are relentlessly moving forward to liberate Iraq and save the world from the treachery and evil of Saddam Hussein.
The negativity and bathos with which this so-far triumphant effort have been greeted are not merely mistakes in emphasis. They are the ways in which the skepticism about the utility of this war has been adapted to battlefield conditions.
It's media bias at its most embedded, because those who are guilty of it don't even know they're guilty of it.
E-mail:
podhoretz@nypost.com
