Depends on how you slice it, I guess, but I always figured the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea to have been somewhat major, and I’m pretty certain that, token though it was, we bombed Tokyo well before Operation Torch.

The media in this war have been scrupulously pro-soldier. The blame-the-media line of attack in Vietnam was thet they derogated not just the command but the soldiers. This time they’ve been very positive in their reporting on soldiers but, once again, it’s the media’s fault. How, exactly? Did the media torturte prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or did American soldiers? Are you suggesting it should not have been reported? Did the media put too few troops in Iraq or did the administration?

We can either have a news media that tells us the truth as well as it can, or we can have a news media that operates as a house organ for whatever administration is in power. The former risks “helping the enemy” and perhaps causes a cycle of disillusion, but the latter makes disillusion inevitable and that ends up helping the enemy.

This is not 1944. We don’t sit around waiting for a newspaper to land on the front porch and learn only the news produced by a handful of reporters. If ABC doesn’t tell us, Al Jazeera, or Agence France Presse, or the Guardian or some other of the endless number of sources will.

It seems strange to me that we have this chorus of attacks on an increasingly small segment of the overall news business. Anyone with a computer or cable has a hundred different newspapers, TV networks, podcasts, blogs, and official sites available. This blame-the-media campaign is the Right’s version of Vietnam syndrome. You’re fighting the last war, just like the Left.

For every overly negative story you quote there are negative stories not being covered. Shia thugs are in Basra right now forcing women off campuses and into burqas, censoring music, beating up barbers for shaving men’s beards, and in general turning southern Iraq into Afghanistan circa 2002. We aren’t seeing much of that story.

We aren’t seeing much of stories that ayatollah ali al-Sistani issues fatwas urging his followers to hunt homosexuals down like animals.

We aren’t reading about the fact that after three years Iraq has less electricity and lower oil production than it had at the beginning of the war.

We aren’t reading much about the fact that at least some Iraqi police are acting as sectarian hit squads and are deeply distrusted by Iraqis.

We aren’t getting daily updates reminding us that the Iraqis still don’t have a government.

A lot of stories don’t get reported, some good, some bad. What gets reported are the explosions and the deaths and little else.

But even if the MSM acted like Pravda do you honestly imagine this thing would turn around for the American people? Today we lost ten guys but hey, we built a school and Marines handed out lollipops in Ramadi? Believe me, the administration does not want honest reporting on its rebuilding efforts.

The facts are what’s killing support for this war: no WMD, looting, Abu Ghraib, lagging reconstruction, Iraqi failure to set up a government, the on-again, off-again nature of the Iraqi forces, IED’s. The American people are not going to rally behind, “As they stand up, we’ll stand down, and then hooray, we’ll have a repressive theocracy.”

Sorry, but you guys are kidding yourselves. It isn’t the media, it’s the facts, and it’s the lies, and it’s the mistakes, and it’s the confusion of mission. “On to Berlin?” Yes. “They stand up, we stand down?” Not so much.

Is the media skeptical, even cynical about US motives? Yes. They swallowed the logic of this war almost entirely at the beginning. Embedded reporters went along as cheerleaders on the trip to Baghdad. And no one in the military or the White House seemed to have much problem with the reporting when it replayed the toppling of the Saddam statue twenty thousand times. Rumsfeld’s press conferences were utterly servile. Soldiers and Marines were universally saints.

As the initial logic of the war frayed, coverage became more skeptical. As administration mistakes become more obvious, coverage grew skeptical. After Abu Ghraib, and the miserable, gutless, dishonest administration response, things really started going south. How they not? As voices within the political class, the punditocracy and even within the military became more critical so did media coverage.

Forgive my quoting at length, but there’s more than just a narrative in there. There’s a presumed structure that I find interesting. It amounts to this: The U.S. media has veto power over every U.S. war. And I’m not sure we want to enshrine that without thinking about it a little more.

The mass media has known it had the ability to whip up the people into a war frenzy since 1898. Only since Vietnam has it discovered this power to throw sand in the cogs of war.

We both point to Ernie Pyle. Ernie Pyle died the day in 1965 or ‘66 the New York Times discovered the military had been lying to its reporters about body counts in Vietnam or the Tonkin incident. The media turned against Johnson, against Vietnam, and it helped disempower the presidency and end the war.

If you think that’s a good thing, you celebrate it; if you think it’s a bad thing, you don’t. But nobody seems to have considered this new, unelected force which has claimed and proven its ability to direct American history.

You say, “yes, but WWII was a good war and these are bad wars.” But who decides that? The media. World War II was not so good at all, of course. We fought in the name of democracy — with the biggest totalitarian of all on our side. We fought for people’s right to determine their national destinies — by the side of colonial empires. We machine-gunned surrendering Japanese, rounded up dissidents and foreigners, committed colossal military blunders killing thousands of American boys, nuked cities. Was Tarawa necessary? Was the Italian campaign a quagmire? How many French women were raped by American servicemen? Who knew what about Pearl Harbor and when?

As for the New York Times, it may well feel that lying to the New York Times is an impeachable offense, but I’m not sure it is.

Should the media’s coverage of a war — any war — be driven by its perception of the U.S. administration?

We are seeing the same kind of war fatigue now. It’s not so much that things have gone wrong or that things having gone brilliantly, it’s just that things have gone on and on. The media may be feeding into the negative perceptions but they didn’t create the hunger.

That said, I do think there is some truth that many in the traditional media have been hostile towards our mission and have tended to portray our nation poorly even in cases where the specific outcome was nuetral or positive.

I think you attribute to the media far too much influence over Americans. While I’m in no position to discuss the media’s portrayal of Vietnam (having been born in ‘74 and thus having no firsthand knowledge) I know that throughout the Iraq war there have been endless media sources available. Some of the MSM has been overly critical, but they are far from the only game in town. For instance, Fox News has been relentlessly pro-war and a LOT of people tune in.

Give the American people some credit. We are not slaves to the news media.

Exactly, the people didn’t see the Dachau Massacre. They didn’t see the horrors of Okinawa.

Today, they would get nothing but.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Vietnamization received a severe test in the spring of 1972 when the North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive across the DMZ using conventional forces. Beginning March 30, the “Eastertide Offensive” quickly overran much of Military Region 1, formerly known as I Corps, including Quang Tri, and threatened the city of Hue. Early in April the North Vietnamese opened three additional fronts in the offensive in the Central Highlands and Binh Dinh province of Military Region 2, and against An Loc in Military Region 3, threatening to overrun the entire country.

The United States countered with a buildup of American airpower to support ARVN defensive operations and to conduct Operation Linebacker against North Vietnam, but continued the withdrawal of American troops, now numbering less than 100,000, as scheduled. By June only six infantry battalions remained in South Vietnam, and in August the last combat troops left the country. The ARVN eventually stopped the North Vietnamese offensive on all fronts, recapturing Quang Tri in September.

Nixon had promised South Vietnam that he would provide military support to them in the event of a crumbling military situation, or a military offensive from North Vietnam, to convince the Thieu regime to sign the ‘peace agreement’. But Nixon was fighting for his political life in the growing Watergate Scandal at the time, facing an increasingly hostile Congress, which held the power of appropriations, and a hostile public, sick of the Vietnam War. Thus, Nixon broke his promises to South Vietnam. Economic aid to South Vietnam continued (after being cut nearly in half), but most of it was siphoned off by corrupt elements in the South Vietnamese government, and little of it actually went to the war effort. At the same time, aid to North Vietnam from the USSR and China began to increase, and with the U.S. out, the two countries no longer saw the war as significant to their U.S. relations. The balance of power had clearly shifted to the North, and North Vietnam subsequently launched a major military offensive against the south.

………………………

South Vietnam could easily have been held with American airpower; they chew up armor like it’s nothing, as 1972 proved. In fact, keeping them there as deterrent probably have been sufficient. It was the greatest military blunder, the most shameful betrayal of an ally, and the worst failure of will in our history.

However, it is attested in dozens of captured documents and intercepted conversations that the Islamist groups regard the Western media s a battlefield, if not a weapon in their hands, and as a place they can fight and win in ways they never can in an open fight with our military. Ought we to ignore that entirely?

WW2 was a relatively clean, up or down fight. At least as the people saw it.

You know it was anything but clean. You know what we did to the Japs in the Pacific islands, and what they did to us. But how did the “people” at home “see it”? Through the eyes and ears of the media.

I think one has a much easier time remaining united behind a goal when one has some clear idea what the goal is.

In 1941, Japan bombed and torpedoed American military bases in Hawaii. The first large-scale military response of America to that was … an invasion of French colonies in North Africa.

What was the goal in World War II? Insure survival of America and accomplish the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and Japan. Even if it leads you through Tunisia. What is the goal now? Insure survival of America and defeat Islamist terrorism. Some say that road leads through Iraq.

No, they’re the reason gullible people believe things are a mess in Iraq.

Again, did we learn anything from Vietnam? Apparently many of us did not, or learned the wrong lesson. READ GIAP’S MEMOIRS. For Christ’s sake, even the enemy military commander says the press won the war for him.

No offense, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. We won every tactical situation. Never lost one major battle.

We lost for one reason, and one reason only: Americans were convinced to give up.

Giap knew it. He WROTE it. To deny it is the same kind of idiocy you claim to be critcizing. Did we learn anything from Vietnam?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060323/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_060322103347;_ylt=Ap.Fq8qM6.0_bhLlmX3zKr9X6GMA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Emboldened a day after a successful jailbreak, insurgents laid siege to another prison Wednesday. This time, U.S. troops and a special Iraqi unit thwarted the pre-dawn attack south of Baghdad, overwhelming the gunmen and capturing 50 of them, police said.

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Although the raid failed, the insurgents’ ability to put together such large and well-armed bands of fighters underlined concerns about the ability of Iraqi police and military to take over the fight from U.S. troops. Sixty militants participated in the assault, which attempted to free more jailed Sunni insurgents, police said.

See? You thought capturing 50 of the enemy in a failed raid was a victory, but in reality, it just “raises questions.”

There is no conceivable outcome to any action in Iraq that is not some kind of defeat in journalists’ eyes.

And as Tony Blair pointed out today, that gives insurgents total control in the propaganda war: if they blow something up, it’s our fault. The media doesn’t talk about how evil they are for wantonly killing people, they talk about how the ISF and Coalition have failed to provide security.

And Ernie Pyle, who was perhaps the single most prominent reporter in the war, regularly reported on the hardships of the GI’s.

Please never, never use Erinie Pyle’s name in comparison with the MSM coverage of Iraq. Thanks.

In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.

Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.

Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.

Do I really have to specualte how the BDS media would describe the same action today? The argument has nothing to do with censoring bad news or human drama coming out of Iraq.

It suffers by comparison to the recent, relatively bloodless interventions in the 90’s, and to the invasion of Afghanistan. But it also looks pretty good in comparison to the world wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

Of course, the question at hand is how much responsibility the media – and by contrast, the Bush Administration – respectively bear for this public perception. I’m not sure what to say about that at the moment, but maybe I’ll chime in again tomorrow.

Perhaps you are frustrated that things haven’t gone wuite as well as promised or expected, or perhaps you believe that there should be only one opinion in the country …. perhaps anyone who doesn’t follow the script 100% shouldn’t be allowed a voice …. but I don’t think that our founding fathers had that in mind. I was for a rigid, brutal, and overwhelming response to 9/11 …. I was never in favor of a corporate war, mimimzing assets and fighting on the cheap. War should be a total comittment by the whole country. It should be fought and won with finality. It should be fought with full time soldiers even if it means a draft …. It should not be fought with the bulk of the National Guard (they should be supplemental to the forces) when they are all too often the mainstreamers (I know someone who has been there for three tours and is happy that they can’t send him back for 24 months)

The MSM has a function here … point out the truth(even if it is ugly) and I will say this for sure …. if we didn’t have the MSM we would know NOTHING about this war and behaviors of our administration because even though I support the efforts this is most secretive administration that I have experienced.

Is the media skeptical, even cynical about US motives? Yes. They swallowed the logic of this war almost entirely at the beginning. Embedded reporters went along as cheerleaders on the trip to Baghdad. And no one in the military or the White House seemed to have much problem with the reporting when it replayed the toppling of the Saddam statue twenty thousand times. Rumsfeld’s press conferences were utterly servile. Soldiers and Marines were universally saints.

As the initial logic of the war frayed, coverage became more skeptical. As administration mistakes become more obvious, coverage grew skeptical. After Abu Ghraib, and the miserable, gutless, dishonest administration response, things really started going south. How they not? As voices within the political class, the punditocracy and even within the military became more critical so did media coverage.

And the problem is that we aren’t fighting Saddam in Iraq, so propping him up as the bugaboo, as TallDave does, is beside the point. We beat him three years ago. Saddam’s been in jail for two years. His sons are dead. Most of the Baathist card deck is captured. Now we are fighting who, exactly? Some leftover Baathists, some Al Qaeda, some Shi’ites maneuvering for position, some crimninal gangs looking for a profit, some militias. And fighting for what, exactly? A Taliban state in Basra? For a free Kurdistan? For a decentralized federation in Iraq? Of course the coverage turns gray rather than black and white, the situation is gray.

I won’t defend everything the press does. I wouldn’t try. They are lazy, they have a pack mentality, they lack a degree of rigorousness I’d like to see. But they aren’t the reason things are a mess in Iraq.

I don’t. I read a lot of the coverage from Iraq today, and I can’t answer those questions the same way.

The media just reflected all of that, they didn’t cause it. The media didn’t locate Vietnam 10,000 miles away and next door to China, they didn’t cover it in jungle, they didn’t give the Vietnamese 20 years’ worth of experience in guerriila warfare, they didn’t force us to ignore what we had learned fighting a guerrilla war in the Philippines.

We were never going to win in Vietnam. Never. Because we had no intention of doing what we had to do. Sherman on war: “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over.” We were not prepared to fight that kind of war in Vietnam, and we weren’t prepared for all-out war because the war did not really matter to us. That wasn’t the fault of the media. We win wars by overpowering and obliterating our enemies: Hiroshima, Tokyo, Dresden, or by having allies who will do same: the Russian advance on Berlin. We won WW2 by being savage and utterly ruthless. We burned cities full of civilians to death. That’s how wars get won. We weren’t ever going to do that in Vietnam.

The Vietnam war lasted longer than ANY OTHER American war. Twice as long as WW2, how long was it supposed to go on? 10 years? 20 years? That’s how the media “lost” the war? By cutting it off at almost nine years?

This is baloney. As is the pitiful, absurd, dishonest, self-defeating effort to pin this mess on the media. The Media didn’t overrule the Army Chief of Staff. The Media didn’t ignore everything we knew about occupation. The Media didn’t spend two years pretending we weren’t facing a real fight.

So, sorry, but don’t try and serve me that bs. I know there are all kinds of websites run by pro-war writers who cannot face facts. I’m a pro-war writer who will.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson030206.html

The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of Yorktown � or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.
…
If many are determined to see the Iraqi war as lost without a plan, it hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still over there. They explain to visitors that they have always had a design: defeat the Islamic terrorists; train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite time for a democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from the Islamists.

We point fingers at each other; soldiers under fire point to their achievements: Largely because they fight jihadists over there, there has not been another 9/11 here. Because Saddam is gone, reform is not just confined to Iraq, but taking hold in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. We hear the military is nearly ruined after conducting two wars and staying on to birth two democracies; its soldiers feel that they are more experienced and lethal, and on the verge of pulling off the nearly impossible: offering a people terrorized from nightmarish oppression something other than the false choice of dictatorship or theocracy � and making the U.S. safer for the effort.
…
In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war � not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home.

Somewhere, Giap is smiling and nodding.

A) Good for you.

B) How did such an incompetent admin have such a brilliant plan?

C) OK, stipulated.

D) No one made that argument, but again excellent beatdown of a strawman.

E) There are always mistakes in war. Doesn’t mean anyone’s incompetent, just that war is difficult.

F) Professionals learn from mistakes by doing better the next time. Idiots sit around second-guessing and calling everyone incompetent.