But while the allies move from victory to victory on the first two "fronts," they are suffering serious and mostly unavoidable setbacks on the third, propaganda, one. I am tempted to stop and argue with the barrage of media reports -- the "24/7 battery of lies" to which I referred in a former article; a remark that filled my inbox with hate mail from my fellow journalists. But there is too much of it for one writer to deal with.
It begins on the small scale with remarks made in sheer ignorance. For instance, an Abrams tank with its treads blown off has not been "destroyed;" its crew is alive, and the tank can be fixed. Or, Apache helicopters grounded by a sandstorm have not been "turned back by Iraqi defenders." A frequent misunderstanding is about sandstorms themselves, which present a net advantage to U.S. forces. At the battle of Najaf, Monday into Tuesday, they were annihilating Iraqi fighters by the hundreds. The U.S. soldiers could see them clearly as heat signatures on their equipment; whereas the Saddamites could not see the Americans.
But it gets much worse than this. To present civilian deaths, such as those in a Baghdad market, even as a U.S. "mistake," on the basis of Iraqi sources only, is to disseminate Saddamite propaganda. In this case, alternative possibilities include an Iraqi inside job, to create a much-needed atrocity story (something they have repeatedly tried elsewhere); a misguided Iraqi surface-to-air missile; or an American cruise missile or bomb deflected from a nearby target by Iraq's recently acquired Russian GPS-jamming equipment. And even if it were an American mistake, western journalists participating in the subsequent Iraqi media tour of the site are directly assisting in a propaganda stunt, designed to inflame anti-American opinion throughout the Arab world, and beyond it.
On the large scale, we have the persistent display of doubts about tactics and strategy from journalists without any qualifications to judge them: who know no military history, indeed hardly any history at all; nor are they in possession of many current facts. Their motives are, moreover, clear enough, for many are people whose anti-Bush and anti-American attitudes were on display long before the war.
We also have, in vast doses, a somewhat less political morbid sentimentality that should have no place in war reporting, for it clouds all judgment on matters of life and death.
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I want to tell my readers directly: do not be discouraged by, and avoid wallowing in, this rich stew of malice. The media front may look grim; but the war itself is going very well.