Military management of the media (2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Blame the media

But Payne also to a large extent gives credence to the notion that "the press" was responsible for military failures like the first assault on Fallujah in 2004.  This not only is a form of scapegoating in itself.  It provides justification, in standard Pentagon logic, for even greater secrecy and more restrictions on the press.  Using the examples of Fallujah and al-Najaf from the Iraq War, he writes:

In both examples, the abiding perception is one of strategic defeat for US forces, whatever the tactical success achieved by the Marines. Fallujah remained an insurgent stronghold, and Moqtada al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” withdrew from Najaf in good order. From this Ralph Peters drew the conclusion that the best way to counter adverse media reporting of the sort he perceived around Fallujah in May 2004 is to “speed the kill. . . . We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization, and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we’re apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.”

Peters’ approach amounts to conducting military combat without a media presence. He suggests speed as one factor—space is another. Sometimes the sheer remoteness of the battlefield, or the level of risk involved, will serve to limit the presence of the media. The invasion of Afghanistan illustrates the point, with little scope for independents to operate in Taliban-held areas of the country, or in the disputed border regions adjacent to Pakistan. Somalia, Chechnya, Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, the southern Philippines, and Kashmir are other examples of places deemed too risky for deploying reporters by many media organizations. On the whole, however, there will always be some sort of media presence, no matter how difficult the terrain or how rapid the military exploitation of a given scenario. Bold freelancers and local operatives armed with satellite phones ensure that there will usually be a Fallujah byline if the story merits one.

Payne doesn't address what is perhaps the biggest flaw in this line of argument.  The Army is overwhelmingly oriented toward conventional warfare, not counterinsurgency.  Ralph Peters is trying to find some way to make conventional warfare work in a counterinsurgency situation without the negative consequences.

Media and journalists as combat targets

Payne argues, "If the media are behaving impartially, then they are entitled to treatment as civilians. Where they are not, the assessment of the general counsel [quoted above] suggests that they can be targeted militarily."

But that statement, quoted in isolation, would give a misleading picture of the point he's making on this.  In fact, he seems to emphasize rather how problematic a decision to target media is.  After citing an example from the Kosovo War where he argues it was justified, he observes:

But making a judgment about the impartiality of a broadcaster or newspaper is problematic. Suppose a television channel were showing graphic footage of the civilian casualties caused by your troops, or that they screened interviews with dejected prisoners of war captured by your enemy. In both examples, this footage could have an effect on the perceptions of the war among viewers on both sides of the conflict. While the combatants themselves are prohibited from this sort of activity, the independent media are not legally a party to the conflict. But does that mean that the station can be legitimately targeted? Then there is the question of proportionate response—should you jam their transmissions, discredit them somehow, or counter their message with your own propaganda? Keeping them away from areas of the battlefield where their reporting would be damaging seems sensible enough, but what lengths can one go to in order to achieve that?

The weight of Payne's argument in this article suggests that designating media outlets or journalists as combat targets is highly problematic and requires a very heavy burden of proof.  He observes in relation to the attack on Al Jazeera by US forces in Baghdad in 2003, that even though the news service "was broadcasting material in the Middle East that could readily be construed as damaging to USobjectives, the lasting opprobrium consequent on attacking the office easily outweighed the temporary advantage from interrupting Al-Jazeera operations in Baghdad."  He also makes the sensible, pragmatic point that, so what if Al Jazeera's reporting in the conventional phase of the war was affecting some people's opinion negatively toward the Anglo-American invaders?  "Coalition forces were easily achieving their military objectives in Iraq and enjoying a broadly sympathetic press, at least in the United States."

One value of remembering the context of specific incidents like this is that, however the US pulls out of Iraq, it's not going to be remembered as the glorious victory that President Bush pantomined in his flight suit on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003.  And we've already got a full-fledged stab-in-the-back theory being promoted by the OxyContin crowd, in which the Liberal Press and the America-hating Democrats undermined public support for bombing, shooting and torturing Iraqis into being a model democracy.

At this point, the major political achievement of the war has been to install a Shiite dominated, religious-oriented regime in Iraq, though the actual government hasn't been put together at this moment.  For those with a tiny bit of imagination, it's an interesting exercise to put oneself in the framework of 1980, with Iranian revolutionaries holding Americans hostage and "Shiite" being taken as being more-or-less synonymous with "murderous Islamic fanatics" in American political discussion.  It was the Iranian Revolution and its anti-American implications that led the US, not without practical justification, to support the secular Baath regime of Saddam Hussein in its war against Iran.

Now imagine what it would have sounded like in 1980 to say, "The United States should invade Iraq and install a pro-Iranian Shiite government there."

No, the endgame in Iraq, whenever it comes, is not going to be a satisfying one for our drooling-at-the-mouth superpatriots.  And they will be eager to blame their usual suspects for their lack of satisfaction.

Stakes for the future

One of the lingering negative effects of the Vietnam War is thatin that conflict, military leaders (civilian and uniformed) badly undermined their own credibility - let me emphasize that, badly undermined their own credibility - by going month after month and year after year, predicting light at the end of the tunnel, talking about all the successful kills of Vietcong and being relentlessly upbeat about the progress of the war.  At some point, reality crashed the party.  It's conventional to describe the 1968 Tet offensive as that point, although the realization had dawned on many Americans long before that.  But it was the Tet offensive along with increasing (and justified!) public discontent that finally persuaded President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford to make a hard-headed re-evaluation of what the military prospects in that conflict were.

Unfortunately, the main lesson that the Pentagon seems to have learned from that experience is not to be more realistic and honest in what they tell the American public, especially during wartime.  Instead , the emphasis has been heavily on trying to control the press reporting to a far greater extent.  That's not necessarily from any malicious intent.  On the contrary, I tend to think it mostly results from the tendencies of bureacratic conservatism that can easily make large organizations self-delusional in the absence of effective management efforts to prevent that.

I've been struck, though, in connection with the Iraq War in particular, to what a great degree the Pentagon is willing to use the press as a scapegoat for their own failures.  It's becoming astonishingly widely accepted that the US military can do anything, conquer anybody, achieve any goal no matter how far away or no matter what the situation on the ground, as long as "public opinion holds firm."

It's not true, and such an attitude only feeds the arrogance of power that led the Bush administration to think it could bring democracy to the Middle East by bombs, bullets and torture.  Citizens in a democracy need to have accurate information about what is happening in wartime situations.  Because we've seen time and again that "tough-minded," serious men (and the occasional woman) can stumble into some amazing military disasters and foreign policy fiascos.  An informed public opinion is a necessary check against such blunders.

<FONTSIZE=2>It's not just the job of the press.  Congress also has a responsibility to challenge administration  secrecy and misconduct and bring it to light.  The Republican Congress is hardly going through the motions of doing that, and they're not going to.  That makes it all the more important for the press to be aggressive in reporting meaningful news, even when it's uncomfortable for Pentagon propaganda operations aimed at manipulating the American people.

I'm allowing myself to hope that the US press will start doing at least a marginally better job at that than Congress is doing at theirs.  Call me a cockeyed optimist.  Jacksonian Democrats are supposed to be optimistic.