The Shrub’s a Yankee Carpetbagger.
That was more true of his dad than it is of him.
- In the era of global instant media and the internet, it is very hard to fight a war because every screwup, every setback, every ambush, will be splattered all over the media and agonized over and used as propaganda by those against the war.
If WWII had been fought in this media environment, images of D-Day, with American bodies floating in the surf, landings in the wrong spot, commandos dropping in the wrong places, and thousands of casualties would have had half of America screaming to bring the boys home.
…Sam, are you honestly saying that it is better to deny free press coverage, black out the news, and have only the government controlling the flow of information? Cover up anything that might look bad? Or am I totally misunderstanding you? Because that sounds SO nuts…
Yeah…After all, those Danes who spend quite a bit more as a percentage of GDP than the pretty piddly percentage that we do are reviled the world over!
As for the rest of your post, how whiny can you get? It reminds me of a little kid who has to have things his way or doesn’t want to play at all!
Hey, it’s the libertarian way! 
Sam, that’s got to be the stupidest comment I’ve seen in a long long time.
Was it the media that caused General Tommy Franks to call neocon Doug Feith the "’‘the f—ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth’’? (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0520-02.htm)
Was it the media that makes General Zinni, head of Centcom until 2000, to say…
And if you think Tom Clancy is a dupe of the media, you’re definitely living on a different planet.
This is a disaster as of now. Virtually everyone knows it. The media is not to blame. That’s the last argument of a bankrupt position. Always has been, always will be.
and there are dupers, but they ain’t in the media:
US Fooled by Iraq Agency it Funded
If it turns out that the Bush Administration effectively allowed itself to be duped by Iranian intelligence, well, a lot of people are going to be toast. Very burnt toast.
Now where did you get that impression? It was a simple statement of fact. I did not make any suggestions as to what should be done about it. It’s not even a particularly original observation. People said much the same thing after Somalia, when images of Americans being dragged through the streets caused a huge shift in support for that conflict. For that matter, some have said that the media coverage of Vietnam had the same effect. It was the first war played out on televisions around the world. This changes things.
This is simply the new reality, and military planners and civilian leaders are going to have to take this effect into account. Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn is that if you’re going to fight a war you’d better fight it fast, before the barrage of horrific images turns the public against it. Or perhaps the conclusion is that if you’re going to fight a war, you had better make sure that you have a huge percentage of the public behind it. Whatever.
That’s a brilliant idea, Sam. All you need to do now is to come up with a catchy title for it. I suggest “Powell Doctrine”. It’s amazing that no-one ever thought of it before. The Admin really should’ve gone to you for advice, 'cause AFAIK, no-one else said anything even remotely like this in the lead up to the war.
:rolleyes:
“The Powell Doctrine” has nothing to say about the effects of media on a nation’s will to fight.
Look, the OP asked a question. I gave an answer. It’s not an original idea with me, and I said so. Why do you need to go on about this?
I agree with Sam on this one, but I think the reason is a growing perception among the public that, because of the technology and “smart bombs”, wars nowadays can be fought without significant casualties.
Nope, that gives the people too little credit. There were pictures of D-Day, accounts of the fighting by reporters who were there, screwups included. Do you think that most people didn’t have radios, or access to LIFE and other such magazines, or to letters home by family members in the service? They knew. By 1944, there was no lack of understanding by the American public of the unavoidable human costs of the war. But the cost was accepted because the goal of the war was so valuable, so necessary, so, well, noble that it was worth it. Screwups happen, yes, they knew it, but that can be tolerated if they’re understood and learned from and not repeated and don’t prevent the larger goals from being attained. Even so, there was a very strong isolationist movement all along, one that kept a low profile after Pearl Harbor for fear of being thought unpatriotic, but re-emerged immediately after VJ Day. They had a lot to do with the “bring the boys home” spirit that pervaded the immediate post-surrender period.
It would be fairer to say that we’ll accept the costs of a necessary war, but not of an unnecessary or even incompetently-fought one. We’ll allow our servicepeople’s lives to be spent to the extent necessary and no further, and they agree to that too, but we refuse to allow them to be wasted. The Iraq war was widely, and now generally, known to have been created under false pretenses, with an illusory goal, and the leadership has shown no ability to even recognize much less learn from its mistakes. That makes every life lost in it a *wasted * one and not a carefully spent one, unlike in the first Gulf War.
“Delaying” is an operative term there. Let’s not forget that GW2 most likely wouldn’t happen without GW1, when Bush Sr. decided to teach Saddam a lesson.
A lesson? Sure, after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Remember that we had, through skillful diplomacy so different from what went on this time, a true coalition with most of the world and full UN support.
My list of lessons is
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Bush Sr. and Powell were a lot smarter than the neocons gave them credit for.
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If at the top level you dehumanize a set of people (like calling anyone you pick up a terrorist without a trial) don’t be suprised if the bottom level people act accordingly.
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No matter how you ignore reality, avoid reading the papers, and believe in following your dogma instead of boring old pragmatism, the real world will slap you in the face eventually.
And what did it get us? Protracted pain in the rear that had to be taken care of eventually, that’s what.
Perhaps one of the lessons is that when you go against some nasty, prepare to go all the way, or do not start at all.
What pain? Nothing compared to what we went through during the Cold War, which ended pretty well, remember. Iraqis were in pain, true, but they’re in pain now also. At the time the war started we had UN inspectors crawling all over Iraq, which was likely to reduce the worst of the atrocities, at least. Eventually this would have either neutralized the problem, caused a coup, or forced Saddam to do something so blatant that we would have been able to invade with UN backing. Instead we got policy dictated by the fantasies of the neocons. No wonder Chalabi was able to take them for a ride, those with stars in their eyes are easy prey for con artists.
Americans back in WW2 were prepared of the ‘All-costs’ prospect of fighting Germany. As long as the outcomes were favorable in Europe and the Pacific, no sacrifice was too large, and the mourning would have to wait.
Now, we aren’t even told to sacrifice. Just keep on pumping gas in our SUVs.
What might that Saddam “blatant” action be?
Sam Stone does raise a bit of a valid point. While WWII had near thorough public support on the home front especially when compared to the present Iraq mess, access to visual images of the fighting were tightly controlled by the Office of War Information for reasons of morale in an era of newsreels and print journalism to a degree no longer possible in the era of the internet, or for that matter cable or even network news. From the prologue of The Censored War:
The public was of course aware that Americans were dying in the fighting, but the first picture of a dead American the general public saw was probably the photo from here captioned “George Strock. Dead GI’s on Buna Beach, 1943.” By this point the US had been in the war nearly two years. While I seriously doubt that the public would have been screaming to get out of the war in World War II if the media environment in the 1940s was what it is today, the government controlled access to what was seen for morale purposes to a level that it can’t in this day and age.