COIN & The Media (catch all)

[BobKing]

Several years ago Robert Kaplan spoke to a SOF class at the Army Command and General Staff College. I can't recall whether he uttered these exact words or not, but I left thinking he had explained how most of the media were "Journalists First, Americans Second." I know he made the point that much of the media see themselves as "citizens of the world."

His visit was shortly after writing "The Media and Medievalism"

In that article, he writes about the Marines fighting in Fallujah, and how they were forced, by the actions of the media, to call a cease-fire resulting in "snatching defeat from victory."

Specifically:

No matter how cleanly the Marines fought, it was not clean enough for the global media, famously including Al-Jazeera, which portrayed as indiscriminate killing what in previous eras of war would have constituted a low civilian casualty rate. The fact that mosques were blatantly used by insurgents as command posts for aggressive military operations mattered less to journalists than that some of these mosques were targeted by U.S. planes. Had the fighting continued, the political fallout from such coverage would have forced the newly emerging Iraqi authorities to resign en masse. So American officials had no choice but to undermine their own increasingly favorable battlefield position by consenting to a cease-fire. While U.S. policy was guilty of incoherence — ordering a full-scale assault only to call it off — the Marines were defeated less by the insurgents than by the way urban combat is covered by a global media that has embraced the cult of victimhood.

I would recommend also checking out Kaplan's "The Media and the Military"

[Cavguy]

In that article, he writes about the Marines fighting in Fallujah, and how they were forced, by the actions of the media, to call a cease-fire resulting in "snatching defeat from victory."

I think the threat of the entire Iraqi Governing Council to resign and the decision of AMB Bremer/LTG Sanchez all had a wee bit to do with it.

Most of that was not because of our media - but the reaction generated by Arab media.