March 29, 2003
Armchair Generals
A different take from the always different Mark Steyn
Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery (Retd) agrees that the media are in trouble, but blames it mostly on a confusion of war aims. "The problem is they relied on this two-pronged 'shock and awe' business. On the one hand, you'd have these reporter chappies embedded with your Royal Marines and so forth, 'awed' at how absolutely ripping it is to be in a tank. On the other hand, you'd have your crack columnists in Baghdad, 'shocked' at the scale of Anglo-American carnage, with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, smart bombs landing on every hospital, nursery schools blown to kingdom come, etc."Well, the bally carnage never showed up, so it was a week of awe and no shock. The editors assumed that, by the weekend, they'd have Bush and Blair on the run. Instead, we now stand on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe: even as I speak, George Galloway, John Pilger and thousands of others are being systematically starved of material.
"And let's not forget that disgusting breach of the Geneva Convention when poor bloody Robert Fisk was paraded across the Independent and forced to eke out 1,200 words about his lavatory paper. So much for superior hot air power. Though I must say the line about how 'In the sands of Mesopotamia, Britain lost an empire but at least I've found a roll' was awfully good."
Longtime gay strategist Alexander the Great argues that you have to look at the root causes. "The media had an over-reliance on their elite special forces, the celebrity contingent," he says. "They move fast, but they're too lightly armed to hold their positions and they're easily shot down. Take Martin Amis: the Guardian hires him to penetrate to the very heart of the subject, only to have him limp back with some feeble comparisons between Texas and Saudi Arabia. We've seen all this before: on the first day, you make a spectacular advance, but the publisher never recoups."
Alexander feels the media planners overestimated the degree of resistance. "If you look at the strategically important stronghold of Hollywood, they said it would be a cakewalk. Michael Moore would have a big cake and then walk to the podium, and he'd be greeted by cheers from the beleaguered locals, who've been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Instead, they jeered him. Oh, sure, now we're told it's not because these isolated Hollywood villagers are loyal to Bush, only that they're too terrified of reprisals to speak out. Funny how the story keeps changing."
Do I have to tell you to go read all of it? Didn't think so.
Posted by Ithildin at March 29, 2003 3:24 PM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHE