Target Centermass

Category: “Our” Media

  • How U.S. Assault Grabbed Global Attention

    Yesterday, I questioned a media description of Operation Swarmer as the “biggest attack since the Iraqi invasion.” Today, the media is questioning itself and finding its own coverage overblown because of a lack of understanding of American military terminology.

    It was billed by the US military as “the largest air assault operation” since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with attack and assault aircraft providing “aerial weapons support” for 1,500 US and Iraqi commandos moving in to clear “a suspected insurgent operating area north-east of Samarra.”

    The international news agencies immediately rang the urgent bells on the story.

    Around the world, programmes were interrupted as screens flashed the news, which dominated the global media agenda for the next 12 hours or more.

    […]

    By the middle of Day Two, the operation had already been scaled down to 900 men.

    Operation Swarmer clearly bore no comparison in scale to the initial attack which brought down Saddam Hussein’s regime, or to the massive assault on the insurgent stronghold in the city of Falluja in November 2004.

    Nor did it appear to match a series of counter-insurgency operations involving air strikes and ground forces in remote areas near the Syrian border in western Iraq last year.

    In one four-day campaign last May, the US military said it had killed 125 insurgents for the loss of nine of its own men killed and 40 injured.

    So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world?

    The use of the phrase “the largest air assault operation” was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign.

    In fact, all the phrase meant is that more helicopters were deployed to airlift the troops into the area than in previous such operations.

    The 50 “aircraft” that had been deployed were not combat jets blasting insurgent targets, but helicopters ferrying in the forces. There was no rocketing or bombing from the sky.

    In US military parlance, “air assault” means transporting troops into a combat zone by air. It could include, but does not necessarily imply, air strikes.

    Ah yes, the media — get the story out, get it right later … maybe.

  • Iraqis to Take Control of Abu Ghraib

    At long last, the possible shrugging off of a media nightmare by the American military.

    Abu Ghraib, the prison that served as a house of torture under Saddam Hussein and was latterly the scene of the US military’s worst prisoner abuse scandal, is to be handed over to the Iraqi government.

    The decision yesterday came as the Iraqi authorities announced they had hanged 13 insurgents, marking the first time militants have been executed in the country since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

    The US military said yesterday that its new facility near Baghdad airport to house security prisoners now held at Abu Ghraib prison should be ready within three months.

    Lt Col Kier-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for US military detainee operations, said completion of the new prison at Camp Cropper, where Saddam and his co-defendants have been held since their capture, would set the transfer in motion.

    “We will transfer operations from Abu Ghraib to the new Camp Cropper once construction is completed there. No precise dates have been set, but the plan is to accomplish this [completion of construction] within the next two to three months,” Lt Col Curry said.

    “Once we transfer operations from Abu Ghraib, the facility will be turned over to the Iraqi government.”

    The prison, which currently holds over 4,500 detainees, came to symbolise US mishandling of some prisoners captured in Iraq, both during the US-led invasion three years ago and in the fight to subdue the largely Sunni Muslim insurgency since then.

    Although I recognize that the prison is now sadly infamous for American military abuses, I have two key questions here. First, does anyone really believe that the Iraqi government and military is sufficiently mature yet to prevent worse abuses? Second, why are Saddam’s abuses, far worse than any chronicled against the American military, never carried in these stories as a frame of reference like the American abusese?

    Widely publicised photographs of prisoner abuse by US military guards and interrogators led to intense global criticism of the US war in Iraq and fuelled the insurgency.

    Photos showed one of the guards, Private Lynndie England, abusing naked Iraqi prisoners, including an image where she held a leash tied around an undressed male detainee’s neck. England was sentenced to three years in prison.

    She was among nine US soldiers who were charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Her ex-boyfriend, Specialist Charles Graner, with whom she had a child, was sentenced in January 2005 to ten years in prison.

    Yes, we abused. Yes, we prosecuted. I thank the author of this story for making the latter clear, though I feel a little more of the prison’s brutal history would have added some perspective. Hell, there would have been no shortage of ways to put the American Abu Ghraib abuse into perspective historically, but that never has been attempted in the handling of this tale.

    The hand-over of authority at Abu Ghraib will take place in phases, Lt Col Curry said, beginning with basic training for prison guards, followed by Iraqis working side by side with US forces at detention facilities. Iraqi guards will then start running detainee operations themselves with a transition team overseeing them before they assume complete control.

    Okay, here’s my predictions on how this story will be handled by the New York Times, the same Paper of Record that carried front-page coverage of American Abu Ghraib for some thirty-some-odd consecutive days: no front page coverage and any article will be accompanied by a tired old American-abuse photo. If I’m wrong about this, it will be on the absence of a photo — it would, after all, attract attention to a story best left buried.

  • Ports Deal Crumbles, Dubai Firm to Sell U.S. Assets

    Well, so much for the United Arab Emirates ports story.

    With President Bush unable to contain a Republican congressional rebellion, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates vowed Thursday to turn over its just-acquired operations at six major U.S. port terminals to an American entity.

    The surprise move came after congressional leaders told Bush on Thursday morning that there was no way to stop lawmakers from blocking Dubai Ports World’s takeover of terminal operations at the ports.

    Republican and Democratic lawmakers reacted cautiously to the company’s apparent surrender, saying they needed to learn more about the details before abandoning their attempts to block DP World.

    DP World obtained the terminals as part of its acquisition of Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., a British firm. That transaction, which the Bush administration approved in January, aroused a public furor that drove Congress into open conflict with the White House.

    The announcement was an extraordinary retreat that signaled a shift in the power relationship between the White House and Congress. Bush has been unused to losing. But this time, the Republican-led House of Representatives, which has been a rubber stamp for the president for the past five years, was the first to revolt.

    Republicans were furious when the president promised last month to veto any legislation that blocked the deal. Congress ignored Bush’s threat, and a 62-2 vote to block the deal by the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday left no doubt that Congress would override a veto if the president dared to cast one.

    After Thursday’s meeting of congressional leaders with Bush at the White House, DP World’s chief operating officer, H. Edward Bilkey, surprised lawmakers when he issued a statement promising that the company would divest itself of its U.S. terminals.

    “Because of the strong relationship between the United Arab Emirates and the United States and to preserve this relationship, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and rule of Dubai, has decided to transfer fully the U.S. operations of P&O Ports North America Inc. to a United States entity,” Bilkey’s statement said.

    Nevertheless, Senate Democrats pressed ahead with attempts to block DP World’s takeover, and House leaders weighed whether to proceed as well.

    Critics of the original deal weren’t backing away from congressional action.

    “I’m skeptical,” said Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. “I’d prefer (legislation) go through because it gives us a safeguard.”

    Likewise, Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he didn’t intend to remove the ports provision from an emergency spending bill for hurricane relief and the war in Iraq.

    Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., added: “Congressional plans are to move forward with the appropriations language next week which kills the transaction. Just to make sure.”

    DP World would have taken over terminals in Miami, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore and New Orleans as well as some stevedoring operations at 15 others.

    […]

    The question that loomed late Thursday was who would buy the U.S. interests, and whether the firm would sell the assets in pieces.

    Eller & Co., whose Miami subsidiary Continental Stevedoring & Terminals sued to block the sale, said it might attempt to buy the terminals. “We are certainly encouraged by what the statement said,” Eller attorney Michael Kreitzer said. “We think we are one of the companies (that could buy it). We have been in the business for 70 years. We could do it.”

    Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., an early opponent of the DP World deal and an influential one as the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Thursday’s announcement was encouraging. “I don’t think Dubai ports would have done this … if they didn’t think there was someone out there,” he said. “Hopefully they have more than one (bidder), otherwise they’re going to have to do a fire sale.”

    Michael Hopkins, the vice president of Crowley Liner Services at Port Everglades in Florida, said he expected DP World to sell its interests to several firms rather than one large operator.

    […]

    “To be honest, I have no idea,” said Steve Erb, who manages P&O ports operations in Miami. “I can just say that the five largest terminal operators in the world aren’t American.”

    I had not blogged on this brouhaha yet, though I had certainly intended to do so (damn you, oncall pager). I’ll admit that I initially balked when I heard the news that an Arab company was being handed the security responsibilities for six American ports. And that right there is why this deal is dead — horridly bombastic, sensationalistic and inaccurate journalism. The deal did not involve control of security. The fact that these six terminals are already managed by a foreign company was not reported. Still, weeks later, a large portion of the stories continued such inaccuracies and omissions. Remember when former Vice President Al Gore yelled that the Bush administration played upon our fears? Well, that is most assuredly what the media did with this story, at the sad expense of the truth. Politicians from both sides chose to capitalize upon these fears. Hey, after all, it’s an election year, and the media have already made clear how they will play this tale.

    Instead, the victim in this tale is an Arab ally, just the sort of friend we should be fostering. Protein Wisdom‘s Jeff Goldstein at expands greatly upon my concerns in this matter.

    Is this a national security question? My sense is that while it has been hyped as such—and that the majority of congress persons and the American public caved to their fears—it never really was. And from a free market perspective—which, along with the promotion of liberal democracy, is part of the memetic message we are trying to sell abroad—this is a set back.

    To win this war, we must insist that our way of life is worth defending. Congress has damaged our relationship with the Gulf states (and in the UAE, we have a very good working relationship), determined our economic policy, and show us to be unwilling to practice what we preach.

    I only hope that the UAE understands the vicissitudes of our political system in advance of elections and is willing to accept that the timing for the deal—moreso than any idea of xenophobia—is ultimately responsible for outcome. Which is strange, feeling like I have to rely on the pragmatism of the UAE in order not to take a giant ideological step backward in the war on terror.

    Similarly, we are going to be forced to rely on the pragmatism of the rank and file Muslim who, we must secretly hope, recognizes that we have security concerns that must be dealt with domestically—and so they are able to resist the spin our enemies are likely to put on this: that the US, as Al Gore already told them, is openly hostile to Muslims.

    […].

    A positive outcome from all this might be that we take a closer look at securing points of entry (and resistance to the deal by Democrats could potentially redound on them when it comes to the Mexican border, if certain Republicans play their rhetorical cards right)—but I hope we manage to do so in a way that is consistent with the free market system we profess to promote.

    Indeed, I hope every senator and representative that has played a part in attacking this business move by an ally will have the integrity to follow through with the rhetoric used to date — move immediately to stop foreign management of all points of entry. Otherwise, just come right out and say that you have essentially used racial profiling to shut down a business deal.

    These same six terminals were previously controlled by a British-owned company; are you saying that our terrorist enemies could penetrate a U.A.E. company but could never have been an issue with the U.K.? Really, I have little complaints about profiling, but there are places where I think it should be utilized first before this instance. I fully expect everyone in Congress who helped kill this deal that doesn’t immediately move against any foreign port management to explain why they will racially profile an ally-owned company but will not racially profile airline passengers that match those who have previously and repeatedly killed our fellow citizens.

  • What I’m Reading Tonight

    First, here’s a somewhat interesting, though rarely insightful, look at the friction between the American media and military.

    “There’s an irony here, because when you had embedding, there was a sense that the reporting was better than ever,” says Dan Goure, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute. “But since the end of major combat operations, the relationship has really gone to hell. There is a strongly held perception in the military – particularly the Army – that the media is doing the enemy’s work. You guys are seen as the Jane Fondas of the Iraq war. And so the military attitude is, ‘why should we level with you, because you’re going to screw us.’”

    That attitude apparently goes all the way to the top: Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that “the steady stream of errors [by the media] all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.”

    Goure says the relationship between the press and military has been bad since the time of the Vietnam War. In World War II and the Korean War, he says, the military had a sense that the press was on their side. But today, he argues, “both the military and the media have unrealistic expectations of each other,” as they have for the past 40 years. “The military expects the media to be a kind of public affairs arm, and the media expects the military to move faster and more agilely on these kinds of issues than they can. When the military is dealing with a problem, it has to go through the chain of command, there are reviews – it’s a very laborious process.”

    All of that seems pretty dead on, but then there’s the following:

    Many of the reporters I spoke to say the military’s secrecy has helped them control stories, which suggests there may not be a change in press strategy anytime soon, despite the embarrassment caused by the Tillman case. Fidell, who has crusaded for more openness on the part of the military, characterizes the situation bluntly. “At the moment,” he says, “they’re winning.”

    The media want more openness from the military, but essentially refuse to cover any positive story that they’re able to dodge. Sure, big tales like successful elections cannot be buried, but I’ll wager that I could go to CENTCOM or Defend America and find a wealth of positive news releases that have received no media play. Heck, while talking about military secrecy or hesitant forthcoming, this story doesn’t even mention the fact that it was indeed the military that broke the news on the Abu Ghraib abuse story.

    Second, Elephants in Academia takes an look at SecDef Donald Rumsfeld’s interactions with wounded American troops and the dichotomy of how this relationship is presented when drawn by an editorial cartoonist and captured by a camera (hat tip to Confederate Yankee).

    I gave writing this post a fair amount of thought for a couple of reasons. For starters, it’s about that Tom Toles Washington Post cartoon from late January, and I hate to give it any more play. And it’s about Donald Rumsfeld, and I’m aware that I’ve had more than enough to say about him recently. But I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind because I found the visual comparison between the two pictures so striking. And ultimately I hope the post is about more than Toles and Rumsfeld–it’s about the disconnect that I see between public perception of the military based on the way it is portrayed in the press and the reality of the military as I understand it. I know it’s somewhat unfair to compare a stylized drawing like a political cartoon with a photograph because of its attendent aura of verisimilitude, so I would like to start with the disclaimer that both are constructs since, of course, all photographs are shaped by the person who pushes the button and by the way the subjects deport themselves. But in this case, I think that, as in the cartoon, the construct is instructive.

    Don’t let the hedging in that intro dissuade you from what is a very intriguing read and a striking visual contrast.

    Third, here’s a so-far fascinating four-corner discussion on the abusive, oft-disgusting treatment of women by many of those of the Islamic faith (hat tip to Howie at the Jawa Report).

    A Muslim rape epidemic in sweeping over Europe — and over many other nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world. The direct connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that their crime is justified since their victims were, among other things, not properly veiled.

    What is the psychology here? What is the significance of this epidemic? And how do we face it when our own feminists, with a few exceptions, are deafingly silent about it?

    I’ll admit I haven’t finished reading this lengthy piece yet but, so far, I’d say it’s safe to tuck it into the know-thy-cultural-enemy file.

  • Reid: More Understanding for Troops Needed

    ‘Tis sad that things have come to a point where a British official must almost beg for his nation to not rush to judgement of its men in uniform.

    Defence Secretary John Reid has called for more understanding of the difficult tasks British troops face in conflicts around the world.

    He asked politicians, pundits and the public to be “a little slower to condemn and a lot quicker to understand” what life is like on the battlefield.

    Advances in technology meant soldiers “have never been under greater scrutiny”, which he said created an uneven playing field for British troops.

    […]

    “We ask an enormous amount of our troops; that the most junior faces risks, dangers, threats unimaginable to most of us; that our officers take calculated risks, and make immediate life and death decisions upon which literally thousands of lives may depend,” Mr Reid said.

    His remarks come in the wake of an international outcry over a video of soldiers beating unarmed Iraqi youths.

    The footage has reportedly lead to regional Iraqi councils in Maysan and Basra ending all co-operation with the British Army.

    Three soldiers have already been arrested in connection with the incident while military police have interviewed four youths about the attack.

    Any abuses by British forces had to be condemned but involved less than 0.05% of the 100,000 troops sent to Iraq and should be kept in perspective, he added.

    And just what did I omit from the above selection? What did my “[…]” skip over? Just the following:

    Just hours after his keynote speech in London, hundreds of mourners gathered for the funeral of Corporal Gordon Pritchard who last month became the 100th British forces member to die since hostilities started in Iraq. He was killed when the Land Rover he was travelling in was hit by a roadside bomb.

    Ah, the ever-present reminder of casualties. Nothing about how Gordon Pritchard lived, but just the fact that he died, thrust into a barely-related story. However, I’m sure the British media do a better job than their American counterparts at covering the abuse stories and accomplishments of their own troops. Well, maybe not, as a Brit veteran is, like Reid, also all but begging for the media to reel itself in on its coverage.

    A former soldier who served in Iraq has urged the media to exercise great care in coverage of the conflict.

    Iain McMenemy was speaking after Defence Secretary John Reid called for more understanding to be shown towards British troops serving in Iraq.

    Mr McMenemy said it was right that abuses by troops were dealt with.

    However, he warned against a focus on “snapshot” incidents and said there should be a greater emphasis on the pressures troops face.

    […]

    Mr McMenemy, from Larbert, near Stirling, was a Territorial Army soldier who served with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    Recalling his reaction on seeing the controversial video footage, Mr McMenemy said: “It comes as a punch in the guts really that the soldiers have carried these actions out because it is going to be used, no matter what the circumstances, to stir up further tensions.

    “But I have to be honest and say I also do get a little bit annoyed that you never hear it from the soldier’s side, you only see the effect, we never actually see the cause.

    “We don’t know what happened to lead to what we’ve seen in the videos or the photographs. We only get that very, very small snapshot.”

    Mr McMenemy said that there was “no excuse” for soldiers acting irresponsibly.

    […]

    Mr McMenemy, a business consultant, said the defence secretary was right to raise concerns that the public were only seeing a “snapshot” of what goes on in Iraq.

    There are similar pleas on this side of the pond, as the conservative group Progress For America has published a couple of videos of veterans and families of our fallen trying to rouse support by espousing our under-reported progress and the nature of our enemies. Unsurprisingly, they have come under attack from the left.

    It has long been the popular notion that Hitler’s 1940 invasion of the Soviet Union was the blunder that cost Nazi Germany the Second World War. Often cited are the mistakes of opening a second front or being unprepared for the Russian winter or incapable of dealing with the eventual accumulation of Soviet resources. Today’s stories led me to think of another reason to consider Operation Barbarossa a mistake — the move depleted the desire for the leftists among the Commonwealth and its soon-to-be-official Yank allies to undermine their own countries’ war efforts, as Allied victory also became intertwined with the salvation of the then-gem of the socialist dream, the U.S.S.R. Bad move, Adolf, some of them might’ve helped ya, if only for deluded reasons. After all, that’s how the term useful idiots came to be.

  • White House Takes Fire in Cheney Hunting Mishap

    Accidental blood on the hunting ground is now predictably followed by a feeding frenzy in the White House media pool.

    The Bush White House took a pounding from reporters today for not immediately disclosing Saturday night that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally shot a fellow hunter, sending him to the hospital with shotgun pellet wounds in his face and chest.

    During his daily briefing, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that Cheney had agreed to allow a member of the hunting party and an eyewitness to the shooting, Katharine Armstrong, to call a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times on Sunday to report the incident.

    The newspaper quickly posted the story on its website. Cheney’s press aides then answered some rudimentary questions, but provided few details.

    The incident at the vast Armstrong family ranch in South Texas occurred about 5:30 p.m. Saturday. The victim was Harry Whittington, an Austin attorney, who was listed in stable condition today at Christus Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi.

    Peter Banko, the hospital administrator, said Whittington would be transferred to a “step-down” unit later today, indicating progress in the treatment.

    McClellan insisted that the vice president’s and his staff’s overriding concern after the shooting was getting Whittington proper medical care. McClellan said that top White House aides, including chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., were being updated in Washington with fragmentary information throughout the night and into the wee hours of Sunday morning.

    “The initial report that we received was that there had been a hunting accident. We didn’t know who all was involved, but a member of his party was involved in that hunting accident, and then additional details continued to come in overnight,” McClellan said.

    “It’s important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs,” he said.

    After the shooting, Cheney rushed to Whittington’s assistance, McClellan said.

    [Sad attempt at NSA/Katrina tie-in deleted. Check the source if you want the garbage]

    The White House’s hands-off role in Saturday’s accident seemed to incite many members of the White House press corps, who bombarded McClellan today with questions suggesting that the White House had been derelict in not getting the information out quickly Saturday evening.

    McClellan referred numerous questions about the incident to Cheney’s press office. But one reporter, ABC News’ Jessica Yellin, complained that the vice president’s office was not providing the answers.

    McClellan said that Card first informed Bush that there had been a shooting accident between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday.

    At one point, McClellan seemed on the verge of losing his poise, as his voice began to rise amid the avalanche of questions being shouted at him. But he quickly regained his trademark composure.

    “I think you can always look at — you can always look back at these issues and look at how to do a better job,” he acknowledged.

    The story goes on to give the details of the incident, which are certainly worth reading — unless one is hoping to use the situation to demonize the vice-president.

    Is this even news? Well, of course it is. The vice-president of the United States of America was involved in an incident resulting in a man being shot. How could that not be news? The Telegraph underlines this point by mentioning the following:

    Historians speculated that this was the first time a vice-president had shot someone since Aaron Burr killed his rival, Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers, in a duel in 1804.

    Is this well within the domain of late-night television satirists and humorists? Well, of course it is, and they have made use of it aplenty.

    Now, I’ve stated what the story is. Here’s what I feel it isn’t: significant. There will be no long-term ramifications, except for a parade of disgusting sniping from the far left. This will provide no leverage for the anti-gun movement. Though I may agree with some of their arguments in some cases, any attempt to capitalize on this obvious accident will fail — they ain’t going to make a dent based on a birdhunt-shotgun peppering. This event may eventually become an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.

    Here’s what else should be taken from the story: the media really need to reign themselves in before (I know I’m almost certainly too late here) they turn themselves into a parody of actual journalism. I only caught a few minutes of the White House press conference before work called me away, but disgust had already settled in over the display. My advice for the traditional media is as follows:

    • First, check your arrogance. That the story wasn’t immediately spoon-fed to you but instead given to the locals by the locals is not a sign of a cover-up.
    • Second, piss-poor decorum in the White House on the trail of a relatively non-event will not win you points with the American public, a public that grows increasingly tired of such partisanship in our nation’s capital.
    • Third, a sense of perspective would help. After a hunting accident, there is no need for accusatory questions about the vice-president’s seemingly hoped-for resignation, however much the so-called journalist may wish for the demise of Cheney. Follow the story, but don’t try to invent one.

    And that is probably all I’m going to say on this matter, other than to wish the best for Mr. Whittington.

  • Another Mohammed Cartoon Link Dump

    Shameful appeasement

    The past several days of mayhem throughout the Muslim world — all thanks to a handful of mild cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed — have provided a clarifying moment for those still uncertain about what the West faces from radical disciples of the Islamic faith.

    What’s clear is that East and West are not just cultures apart, but centuries, and that certain elements of the Muslim world would like to drag us back into the Dark Ages.

    What is also clear is that the West’s own leaders, both in Europe and the USA, as well as many of our own journalists, have been weak-spined when it comes to defending the principles of free expression that the artists in Denmark were exploring.

    Instead of stepping up to passionately defend freedoms won through centuries of bloody sacrifice, most have bowed to ayatollahs of sensitivity, rebuking the higher calling of enlightenment and sending the cartoonists into hiding under threat of death.

    Many U.S. newspapers have declined to reproduce the cartoons out of respect for Muslims, setting up the absurd implication that an open airing of the debate’s content constitutes disrespect. Both the U.S. State Department and the Vatican have declared that Muslims were justified in being offended, while former president Bill Clinton, speaking in Qatar last month, called the cartoons “appalling.”

    Read the whole column. I particularly like the following portions:

    Thanks to this heritage of healthy irreverence, today self-deprecation and parody are favorite ingredients in the volatile, spicy stew we call freedom. That’s why we roast our most powerful in tribute — and why politicians collect, frame and display cartoons that lampoon them. The ability to laugh at oneself, or to shrug off insult, is a sign both of a mature ego and a mature society.

    Unfortunately, much of the Arab/Muslim world enjoys no such legacy, much to its cultural impoverishment and to our potential peril. It might help us to win this war of ideas if we properly understand our own.

    … and …

    Two common apologist arguments beg rebuttal. One of them compares printing inflammatory cartoons to crying “fire” in a crowded theater, implying that one shouldn’t express things certain to offend others. Never mind that all political commentary would cease by such a standard, but the reason crying “fire” is forbidden is practical. People panic and stampede when they hear it, and it is false. It is imperative to cry “fire” when there really is a fire. It is also imperative to cry foul when cartoonists face death threats for doodling.

    The other argument, also based on a logical fallacy, is that the Danish cartoons are comparable to racist caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the segregationist South. The Boston Globe, which saw fit in the past to defend “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of urine) as well as a depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in feces as worthy of government subsidy, made such a case recently.

    There are at least two reasons why The Globe’s comparison is bogus: gas chambers and lynchings. Both the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were officially sanctioned enforcers of immoral social orders that used caricature to further degrade and dehumanize beleaguered minorities they ultimately murdered.

    There is no equivalence between organized murder on behalf of a malignant social system and a half-dozen nerdy artists, speaking only for themselves, lampooning a fanatical religious sect whose members, by the way, specifically advance the delightful goal of exterminating millions of “infidels.”

    The correct comparison, in fact, for Nazi and Klan terrorists are their brothers under the hoods — the jihadists who issued a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie, who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and businessman Nick Berg, and who kidnapped an innocent American female journalist and showed videos of her sobbing and terrified among armed men holding guns to her head.

    A ‘dangerous moment’ for Europe and Islam

    As Islamic protests grew against the publication in Europe of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, a small Arab movement active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark responded with a drawing on its Web site of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank. “Write this one in your diary, Anne,” Hitler was shown as saying.

    The intent of the cartoon, the Arab European League said, was “to use our right to artistic expression” just as the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten did when it published a group of cartoons showing Muhammad last September. “Europe has its sacred cows, even if they’re not religious sacred cows,” said Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the organization, which claims rights for immigrants aggressively but without violence.

    Such contrasts have produced a worrisome sense that the conflict over the cartoons has pushed both sides across an unexpected threshold, where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.

    “This feels to me like a defining moment,” said Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor of European history. “It is a crunch time for Europe and Islam,” he said, “it is an extremely dangerous moment,” one that could lead to “a downward spiral of mutual perceptions, and not just between extremists.”

    U.S. says Iran and Syria stoking cartoon protests

    America entered the row over the Muhammad cartoons yesterday accusing Syria and Iran of stoking up protests against the caricatures to suit their own ends. In France, the publication of all the offending cartoons by a magazine sparked further protests.

    Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said: “I have no doubt that Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and have used this for their own purposes. The world ought to call them on it.”

    Meanwhile, as all this plays out over a dozen, generally tame cartoons, some of which showed more the cartoonist’s fear of Moslems than an image of Mohammed, realize that today’s tremors are, at least in part, driven by lies and fakes (hat tip to Gateway Pundit).

    Also remember that, while the entire brouhaha is supposedly based upon the employment of images of the prophet Mohammed, such images are certainly nothing new. No, there are other motivations at play here, and they may be a case of radical Islamists showing their hand too early.

  • Tonight’s Reading: Taranto on Today’s Media

    In a lengthy opinion piece, James Taranto takes on the mainstream media for their biased and disingenuous coverage of the Iraqi theater, Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan and the supposed blown cover of Valerie Plame.

    While I agree with Taranto that the media have worked themselves into a growing credibility problem through poor journalistic practices — indeed, I have stated often that my opinion of today’s media was a driving factor in my starting this site — and have been afflicted with an internal rotting since the 1968 Tet Offensive, I find myself far less optimistic than Taranto about the current ability of our media to cost us victory in the present conflict. Taranto’s stance is as follows:

    It would be fatuous to deny that this dour drumbeat of defeatism has some effect on public opinion, which after all is driven by the most fickle members of the public. By last fall, polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought it had been a mistake to liberate Iraq, though some 70% had favored the war when the shooting began in March 2003. But a majority continue to oppose a precipitous withdrawal. Most Americans, it seems, do not want another Vietnam, which they understand to mean a self-inflicted American defeat.

    The media’s one-sided coverage may actually undermine the antiwar cause. It does a disservice to antiwar politicians by giving them the impression that the public is fully behind them–an echo-chamber effect similar to that which helped John Kerry lose the election of 2004 (see “Kerry’s Quagmire,” July 20, 2005). Thus in December, when Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean responded to the media panic by declaring that “the idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that, unfortunately, it’s just plain wrong,” fellow Democrats scrambled to distance themselves from him.

    And the media’s adversarial approach has proved costly in public trust. In a Pew Center survey conducted in early November, just after the indictment of Scooter Libby, only half of those polled said the press was fair to the Bush administration. The president’s approval rating in the same poll was just 36%, so this was far from a pro-Bush poll.

    […]

    With the mainstream media facing a skeptical public and competition from those with other viewpoints, it seems unlikely that Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam–a war lost in large part because of the media’s opposition.

    I feel differently, believing very strongly that the media still have sufficient power to seize defeat from the jaws of victory but need more bad news and American blood upon which to base their efforts. As it is, their are forced to steadily beat the drum of quagmire and despair, scantily covering success and heroism while carefully restraining from providing historical perspective that may reflect well on our current endeavors.

    Taranto does provide himself a giant caveat — the wild card of another terrorist strike in the American homeland. Hat tip to In the Bullpen‘s Chad Evans, who gives his thoughts on the possible fallout of Taranto’s wildcard situation.

  • 100th British Soldier Dies in Iraq

    The casualty-figure coverage and round-number obsession is not limited to merely American troops, as the media and anti-war folks are now using the sad century mark for British deaths in Iraq.

    Two British soldiers have died in southern Iraq this week, bringing the number of the UK force to die during the conflict to 100, a Ministry of Defence statement said.

    On Tuesday morning, an explosion killed a solider in Basra province. Three other soldiers were wounded in the same incident — one seriously.

    Another British soldier died Monday morning after his patrol came under fire in Maysan province.

    The defense ministry did not give the identity of the 100th soldier, nor of the others hurt in Tuesday’s blast, all from the 7th Armoured Brigade, the main British force in Iraq. The three injured soldiers were being treated at a British base.

    Anti-war campaigners in Britain seized on the 100th death to once again demand Britain pull out of Iraq.

    The Stop The War Coalition was due to hold a vigil at parliament Tuesday evening to read out the names of the dead.

    Left-wing Member of Parliament George Galloway, one of those reading out the names, told CNN it was a “melancholy milestone.”

    “We have just sent thousands of new soldiers to Afghanistan, if anything an even more dangerous mission. Events are marching in the direction of the vindication of the anti-war movement.

    I’m afraid Galloway is unsurprisingly confused. Simply put, dangerous does not imply wrong. Had the likes of Galloway held sway in the Great Britain of the ’40s, well, red armbands would be all the rage in London today and reality TV would still suck.

    As to the media attention to casualties at the expense of true war coverage, I’ll again quote Power Line‘s Paul Mirengoff, who blogged the following:

    Have you ever read a history of war that focused almost entirely on casualty figures (with an occasional torture story and grieving parent thrown in), to the exclusion of any real discussion of tactics, operations, and actual battles? I haven’t. But that’s what our self-proclaimed “rough drafters” of history are serving up with respect to Iraq.

  • Strike Reportedly Kills al-Qaida Militants

    We aimed for Ayman al-Zawahiri, ranked number two in the latest al Queda polls but bouyed in the BCS by being ranked higher in some computer rankings. We apparently missed.

    Now, the news is that it looks like we nailed some key bad guys.

    Pakistani intelligence agents hunted Wednesday for the graves of four al-Qaida militants believed killed in an airstrike near the Afghan border including one authorities suspect was a high-ranking al-Qaida figure.

    ABC News reported that a master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert for al-Qaida was killed in the attack on the village of Damadola last week. He was identified as Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, who ran an al-Qaida training camp and has a $5 million reward on his head.

    According to ABC, Pakistani officials also said two other terror network officials were killed: Khalid Habib, the al-Qaida operations chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi, a senior operations commander for the group.

    Pentagon officials said they had no information on the report. A Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to journalists, said authorities still did not know the names of the dead foreign militants but suspect one was a ranking al-Qaida figure.

    “We have no names. We know one of them had value in al-Qaida. He had intelligence value in the network, but we are still checking his name,” said the official.

    […]

    The U.S. government refuses to discuss the airstrike, which has been condemned by Pakistan.

    Provincial authorities say the attack killed 18 residents of the Pashtun village, and they also say they believe sympathizers took the bodies of four or five foreign militants to bury them in the mountains, thereby preventing their identification.

    “Efforts are under way to investigate further,” said Shah Zaman Khan, director-general of media relations for Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

    He said authorities were also looking for two prominent pro-Taliban clerics accused of harboring militants, Maulana Faqir Mohammed and Liaqat Ali, who were allegedly in Damadola and survived the assault.

    Intelligence officials say the dead foreigners could be aides of al-Zawahri, who is thought to have sent them in his place to an Islamic holiday dinner to which he’d been invited in Damadola on the night of the attack.

    My first point is this: either the residents of this village knew how to spin on a global stage or the international media was willing to give them a helping hand.

    Hours after the attack, an Associated Press reporter visited the village, which consists of a half-dozen widely scattered houses on a hillside about four miles from the Afghan border.

    Residents said then that all the dead were local people and no one had taken any bodies away. However, it appeared feasible bodies or wounded could have been spirited away in the darkness after the attack, which took place about 3 a.m.

    Islamic custom dictates that bodies be buried as soon as possible, and the reporter saw 13 freshly filled graves with simple headstones and five empty graves alongside them apparently prepared for more dead. When the reporter returned the next day, the five empty graves were filled in, apparently because no more bodies had been found in the rubble.

    The only tidbits of official information that have surfaced since then have come from provincial authorities, and they have yet to give a list of the dead. But Pakistani intelligence officials have said they believe some of those killed were Pakistani militants and that their bodies were also removed from the scene.

    A Pakistani army official has told the AP that some bodies were taken away for DNA tests information at odds with reports from provincial authorities. The federal government has not confirmed the report about DNA tests.

    The rush by the media resulted in a major gaffe, as Michelle Malkin and a good chunk of the blogosphere showed us yesterday.

    My second point is that our intelligence appears to have been rather good and timely in this case — certainly a nice development. And some bad guys are taking that long dirt nap. Hooah!

    Assuming Zawahiri lives, I’d reckon his ties with the locals have certainly become a wee bit less enthusiastic … from both perspectives.