Posted on 05/20/2004 5:19:06 AM PDT by Tom Jefferson
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:21:56 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
May 20, 2004 -- IN Iraq last month, I learned a great deal about the future of combat. By watching TV. During the initial fighting in Fallujah, I tuned in al-Jazeera and the BBC. At the same time, I was getting insider reports from the battlefield, from a U.S. military source on the scene and through Kurdish intelligence. I saw two different battles.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
We saw it in the beginning of the war when we waivered for months so that Colin Powell could try to put together his coalition, while convoys of trucks carried unidentified materials out of Iraq and into Syria.
bump!
Gen. Kimmit just briefed on the high nunber of successful military operations in Iraq and the fact that the money-for-weapons program has been so successful in Fallujah that it's been extended for two more days. Iraqi's are patrolling in Fallujah, where is the defeat?
While the author's correct about the perfidy of media reporting during war, (this one, VietNam, take your pick) the rest of his premises are bunk. Sombody must have peed in Peter's cornflakes....
Prairie
One should ask why so many in the US media/press in their reporting are more concerned about Terrorists who want to kill us
What do we do when our media is our enemy?
They are trying to duplicate their "victory" in Viet Nam: causing the defeat of the USA.
How do we put pressure on our own Tokyo Roses and Lord Haw Haws? How do we make it so painful for them to continue to be 5th column traitors, that they cease and desist?
Actually the media is running the country AND destroying it. Whether it be in the courts or the 'gumm'nt' the media is king - unelected scumbags directing the outcome of damn near everything. They ARE the enemy, and will remain so until the nation is free of idiots.
Inclusive or non-inclusive of Rule 7.62?
That is why our leaders appear so gutless today compared to the past. There is no consensus that we should defend ourselves against terrorism, and the anti-American networks are wholly concerned with catering to the rotten half of America.
One of the first things we should have done was bomb Al Jazeera out of existence. Second, we should have only allowed reporters in country if they were embedded and approved. Finally, any reporter caught in country without approval should be treated as an enemy combatant and interred until the war is over.
But we can't do that because the rotten half of the country simply does not take war seriously.
HUA.........Thanks !
I use the image of hamburger. Our press and our weak politicians are turning our troops into hamburger. Casualties by the thousands hundreds of thousands we could take. That is if we were winning decisively. But seeing our troops used for temporary victories is like using them for the meat grinder.
We need leadership that can ignore the media and win the war. The American people will mistrust any politicians who demonstrate a willingness to run the war based on media pressure. A presidential candidate who promised to win the war on terror in one term, for example, could be elected.
Sooner or later (the 30,000 body bag in the war on terror?), there will come a breaking point. Unfortunately, only half of us Americans seem to think that 9/11 was worse than 1,000 Pearl Harbors. But that rage should tell the other half how serious a matter it is to ignore us. It ought to inform the media what their fate will be if they continue to fight against America's soldiers.
The media is our generation's meat grinder.
Maybe there could be another N Korean train wreck @ al Jerkazerra's headquarters.
One never knows when those NK trains will explode and where!
i agree, we need to kill them so fast that the news media doesn't have time to catch their breath. we should kill them so quickly that we stay at least a week ahead of the news media reports. don't let them keep one report in the news for days. make them file at least a dozen new reports per day to keep halfway current.
Kill the feed. Jam the signal. Establish "technical difficulties." Do something that shuts them down. Instead of a seven second delay, there should be a seven hour delay. We have military media people. Use them to record what is going on and then present it to the established media. Either use it or lose it. If they refuse to use it, they do not belong on the battlefield. Ship them home!
I don't actually care WHAT happened to enemy prisoners at some hellhole in Iraq.
Not even one little bit. I don't know anyone else who cares, either (real person, non-media).
Any Americans who do care are already unrecoverable Kerry voters.
So, the question is, why the big political reaction from Bush and his crew?
The answer, awful though it is, is that Bush himself must care about the media and what they say, and he is not in touch with his own supporters.
THAT'S reason to worry.
...To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.
Time is the new enemy.
Fighting faster at the dirty-boots level is going to be tough. As we develop new techniques, we'll initially see higher casualties in the short term, perhaps on both sides.
But as we should have learned long ago, if we are not willing to face up to casualties sooner, the cumulative tally will be much, much higher later. We're bleeding in Iraq now because a year ago we were unwilling even to shed the blood of our enemies.
The Global War on Terror is going to be a decades-long struggle. The military will not always be the appropriate tool to apply. But when a situation demands a military response, our forces must bring to bear such focused, hyper-fast power that our enemies are overwhelmed and destroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us.
If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.
The above is exactly right and we should have known this going in. That's my only criticism of this war.
I have an extremely difficult time believing that had we simply wiped out Fallujah and one or two other hot spots or insurgent rebel leaders even to the tune of thousands of innocents truly killed, that our 'image' would be any worse. I'd wager we'd have a LOT more respect over there however.
Reagan confronted the liberal, biased American media on this when he suggested to them that they weren't on our side.
Remember how they squealed? The dog that gets hit is always the one that yelps!
The US media was instrumental in making vietnam the mess it became. Likewise, the US press was complicit in the treasonous announcement by swimmer kennedy that he wished the iraqi terrorists would turn up the heat on US forces so Bush would have to pull out of iraq. Attacks, which had been on the decrease, suddenly surged, starting with the fallujah incident.
An iraqi terrorist, when interviewed, stated that they were not listening to OBL, they were listening to kennedy and took heart from his statements - kennedy, via the US media, was directly responsible for the four civilians murdered in fallujah and the following conflagration there.
The press is aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States from their position of Bush hatred and "blame America first" liberal biases. There was a day when treason was punishable by death.......oops, I'm wishing for "the good old days" again - sigh.
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