MB Civic

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 7:48 PM and filed under Articles, Foreign Affairs, Media, Middle East, Politics, War. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

2 Responses to “NYT: The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?”

1. ben stagg said:

   I think that most of us feel that they are finally getting on with the job of getting out of Iraq.
   We are hopefully in a period were the Iraqis are becoming more and more capable of running things themselves, and in a period of reduced violence there is the opportunity for internal solutions to be found.
   Whether these solutions will turn out to be centralist or regional, or a bit of both is hard to say.
   We, and the media must wait for these things to become evident, and in the meantime the world waits to find out if the Big White Chief is going to be a Big Black Chief, a White Woman Chief, or much as before. The importance of this would not be lost on you, if you lived in Iraq.

   Posted on 25-Mar-08 at 2:16 am | Permalink
2. Vigilante said:

   Alex S. Jones says:

   “Vietnam held the media’s attention a lot better because it was a war with a draft that touched a lot more people; people were sent against their will, and many more Americans were killed … In a conventional war, like World War II, there’s dramatic change, a moving front line, a compelling narrative.”

   But after the triumphal first months, Iraq became a war of insurgents vs. counterinsurgents, harder to make sense of, “with more of the same grim news, day after day.”

   That is to say, we are in, and have been in, occupation mode. That’s what counterinsurgency (COIN) is: war against the people. We are in slow bleed mode: drip … drip … drip … We turn around, five years after Bush declared major hostilities are concludedand we have 4,000 trops dead, Killed in action, KIA.

   How long were the French in Algeria? 1954-62. It took them four years of trial and error to develop a doctrine and operational concept able to defeat the FLN inside Algeria and prevent outside assistance from reconstituting the FLN. By 1960 it was apparent the FLN could not win the liberation of Algeria militarily. However, the political situation respective to France and Algeria internally and internationally by then had changed to the point that military operations in the field were not going to affect the political outcome in Algeria. The French Armed Forces took too long to adopt an effective doctrine to combat the insurgent threat and by the time they were effective it was irrelevant.

   Occupations are not won or lost. Occupations are ended. As long as we talk about the “war” in Iraq, the more we feed the Busheney mythology that our national pride is at stake in victory or defeat in Iraq.

   Posted on 25-Mar-08 at 6:53 am | Permalink