HERE’S THE SITUATION: The war in which American forces are advancing on schedule to a victory over Iraq has suddenly been cast in a negative light. What caused this to happen? The answer is unrealistic expectations by the media of a quick, virtually uncontested victory and one important mistake by the American military.
The truth is the war is going well. The firefights on the road to Baghdad and in Basra have little if any bearing on the successful outcome of the war. Iraq’s taking of American POWs is painful to watch on television, but that too is not an impediment to defeating Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power.
None of the scary predictions about the war have turned out to be correct. Israel has not been hit by Iraqi missiles and brought into the fighting. The Iraqi oilfields have not been torched, nor have bridges been destroyed or lowlands flooded. Weapons of mass destruction have not been used. And despite demonstrations in Arab countries, the so-called Arab street cannot be said to have erupted and Arab governments friendly to the United States are not close to collapsing.
So why the negative tilt to the stories? The military brass are partly to blame. In briefings, they touted the inundating of Iraq with leaflets urging surrender. They talked about contacts with Iraqi generals, including calls to their cell phone numbers. They engaged in negotiations regarding mass surrender of Iraqi units. They stressed the work of American special operations teams behind Iraqi lines.
The result in five days of war was 6,000 Iraqi troops who surrendered. This was a far smaller number than reporters had come, rightly or wrongly, to expect. And so they jumped to the conclusion that the military’s plan to achieve mass defections had gone awry. At best, this was a premature assessment. At worst, it was terribly wrong.
A second cause of negative coverage was the military’s extraordinary success in the initial hours of the war. The Iraqi opposition seemed to melt away. When resistance did appear, it seemed all the more surprising and significant. And the fact that American forces suffered casualties, a minor number in the context of a multi-front war, was treated by the media as far more significant than it was.
But there was a more important cause of the negative tilt to the coverage–the nature of journalism itself. What’s new is news and gets big play, especially on television. A breaking story often gets big play even if its impact on the war is marginal. Should there be film to go with it or a dramatic element, it’s all the more likely to get heavy coverage.
Thus. in a 24-hour cycle on Sunday and Monday, three stories got enormous press attention, though they were peripheral to the success or failure of the war. First, an American soldier was accused of attacking fellow members of the 101st Airborne with grenades. Then, several American units encountered tough resistance from Iraqi soldiers. Finally, POWs were captured and presented on Iraqi TV and then on worldwide television. Together, the three incidents transformed the story of the war, which became basically negative, but not the reality of the war, which remains positive.
The American mistake was the failure to knock out Iraqi television. This was not an oversight. The strategy is to show Iraqi citizens they are not the enemy and won’t be punished by having their electric power, phones, water, and TV shut off, as occurred in the Gulf war in 1991. Besides, leaving the infrastructure intact will make the rebuilding of postwar Iraq easier.
The downside is that Saddam Hussein is using TV to pretend he’s in charge of his regime and in control of events. This is surely staving off defections. And it gives him a method of communication with the Iraqi people he otherwise wouldn’t have. The remedy is clear: Put Iraqi TV off the air now.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
