What strikes me whenever I see television news coverage of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflict is how predictable it is: the headline is almost always, “Iraq violence,” or “Iraq casualties” or “Iraq bombings,” followed by a casualty count – but only of US military personnel, Iraqi police and/or civilians. Seldom, if ever, is any mention made of enemy casualties.

This is often followed up by footage of US troops engaging an unseen enemy, which is then followed by a snippet from enemy film footage showing them blowing up something or striking defiant poses.

The casual viewer can easily be excused, after a steady diet of such coverage, for concluding the following:

1. Our troops only go to Iraq/Afghanistan to die. Since we almost never hear of their accomplishments, but almost only of their casualties, what other conclusion is there?

2. The enemy is (A) seemingly invincible, as we seldom if ever hear of them taking casualties in return; (B) in high spirits, if the film footage of them boldly and defiantly wreaking havoc and brandishing/shooting their weapons is the only indication we receive; and as a consequence, (C) the enemy is winning.

3. The Iraqi people are an ungrateful lot, who (A) express no support for the efforts of our military in helping to rebuild their infrastructure and institutions, (B) are more interested in killing our soldiers and one another than in creating a civil society, and therefore (C) are unworthy of representative self-government or our continued presence.

Upshot: “It’s a quagmire, and we’re losing – and now, even George Bush ‘admits’ that it’s just like Vietnam!!

The conflict we are engaged in has many facets, and the challenge is to grasp the overall picture without focusing too much on only one angle, and a defeatist one at that. It’s much like the old fable about the blind men trying to describe an elephant, each of them extrapolating the part that he was groping into what he thought the entire creature looked like (e.g., a snake, a tree, a wall, etc.). Imagine what one of them would’ve made of the elephant if he’d stuck his head up its rectum – that’s what our media’s portrayal of the GWOT is like.

In their, “this really stinks!” point of view, never mind the fact that the enemy, by their own admission in captured documents, is taking heavy casualties and is losing both militarily as well as in their efforts to win over the local populations.

Never mind that we’ve made great strides toward setting up legitimate, duly elected representative governments in these places, as well as toward setting up their own military and security forces.

Never mind that the only real similarity to Vietnam is that much of our own media is trying to help the enemy’s cause through slanted and incomplete reporting of what’s happening, and that they’re being aided and abetted by one of our major political parties and the segment of our society it represents – people that want power so desperately that they’re willing – and attempting – to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because they believe that’s the ticket to their own success.

Spurius Ligustinus on October 19, 2006 at 4:42 PM