It’s not every day that the MSM reviews and reports on blogs, but the Christian Science Monitor’s Dante Chinni took the time to review Bill Roggio’s excellent blogging from Iraq in an article titled “The value of a pro-war blogger’s reports from Iraq.” Chinni, while somewhat sympathetic to Roggio (and urging people to read the blog) nonetheless makes it clear that the pro-war side is losing:
….The war is increasingly viewed as a grim, chaotic mess.
Voters made their disappointment in the war known a month ago in the midterm elections, according to exit polls that showed the issue was an important vote driver. Official Washington sanctioned that view last week when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, wrote in its report that the situation on the ground was “grave and deteriorating.”
That certainly is the public perception, and it also seems to have increasingly become the perception promulgated by the government. But Roggio (claims Chinni) seems to be propounding an alternate view of reality, one in which the war might be winnable:
But for those who troll the blogosphere for news, there is a distinctly different view of the Iraq war available. In this version, the United States is “winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas,” but “losing the information war.”
This is the war as seen and posted by Bill Roggio, a former active duty soldier (in the early 1990s) and current blogger embedded with marines in Iraq.
Winning the war on the battlefield, but losing the war for public opinion?
Gee, if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that was what happened in Vietnam. Who’d have ever thought we might be repeating mistakes of the past? (But what if a mistake is repeated deliberately? Is it really fair to call it a mistake? Words sometimes fail me, which is why I tend to write ridiculously long essays about the meaningless-but-meaningful meaning of issue-framing phrases like “gun violence.”)
Anyway, whether the public opinion war is being lost by mistake or by design, the dialogue between Roggio and Chinni fascinates me, because I think it reflects the current state of the Iraq War — or maybe as a measure of the pulse of the public perception war. Yes, there’s still a pulse. Barely.
For pure pathos, nothing beats this MSM view of Roggio — a blogger — as a sort of “government talking points” guy:
His bias can be overwhelming at times – his posts can sound a lot like government talking points filtered through war stories. When he’s not filing stories from a war zone, he likes to take issue with the mainstream media’s reporting of events, such as The Washington Post’s recent report on the dangers of Anbar Province. He often sees Al Qaeda as the hand behind most of what’s going on in Iraq, such as the Thanksgiving bombings that killed more than 200.
Those views are not in the mainstream and many people, including Iraq Study Group cochairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton, do not subscribe to them. But while some might discount Roggio as a journalist who lets his patriotism and ties to the military get in the way of his work, there is value in his reportage.
In the voices of Roggio’s soldiers, readers hear a soldier’s perspective – or at least some soldiers’ perspectives – on the efforts in Iraq and the way the media are covering them. In Fallujah, for instance, Roggio writes of the distinctions the US troops draw between the Iraqi Army, which they have some faith in, and the Iraqi police, which they discount as “gangsters.” And in another recent post, he describes a real and growing dislike for the press among the soldiers who, he says, feel the media have “abandoned” them.
In light of the Baker approach (and Colin Powell’s remark about the troops being “about broken“) it’s looking more and more as if the government itself has abandoned them.
But is “abandoned” the right word? Again, I think this goes to the difference in perceptions. For years now, we have been treated to cries of “SUPPORT THE TROOPS!” Yet to one side, support means helping them win, and to the other side, support means bringing them home. Seen in this context, the word abandon has more than one meaning. Right now, the government consensus idea is to send in more troops, not to fight the war to victory, but ensure an orderly withdrawal.
I don’t know what the government talking points will be, but in terms of public perception, it might end up looking as if the troops were sent in as part of an evacuation.
Again, if abandonment is the issue, what is abandonment? To a soldier, it might be abandonment of the goal of victory. But to many war-weary civilians (naturally tired of reading daily reports of IEDs killing troops) leaving them in these awful war zones constitutes abandonment, and support means evacuating them ASAP. To many in the MSM, support for the soldiers means portraying them the way victims of Hurricane Katrina were portrayed — in need of rescue. (Yes, I’ve been blogging long enough to remember the endless media comparisons between Katrina and Iraq. It’s just the way they think. I guess I should be thankful that the Iraq War can’t be blamed on Global Warming.)
The problem with language is that either side can see supporting the troops as rescuing them from abandonment.
Same words, opposite meanings.
In war, it strikes me that abandonment of victory is abandonment of the troops who fought and died in the hope of victory. I know that since Vietnam, this is a minority view. But then, I never claimed to be a government spokesman.
Fascinatingly, Bill Roggio (whose link led me to the CSM piece) addresses the supreme irony of being tarred with the label of being a sort of government points spokesman:
The Christian Science Monitor’s Dante Chinni writes about my current embed in Fallujah and the blog in general. Mr. Chinni does have some kind words to say, and does encourage people to read. I will state that Mr. Chinni should look at my full writings on Pakistan and Somalia and Afghanistan, and even Iraq, before stating my “posts can sound a lot like government talking points filtered through war stories.” I fail to see how saying we lost western Pakistan to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Somalia to the Islamic Courts, and failed to subdue al-Qaeda in Ramadi and Muqtada al-Sadr, are government talking points. In fact, I’ve made some people in the government very uncomfortable.
Pakistan, The New York Times, and the International Crisis Group
I’m happy to see the New York Times and the International Crisis Group have finally come around on Pakistan. I’ve been discussing the fall of western Pakistan in detail since January of 2006, and wrote almost 60 articles on this subject. It would have been nice to have received some credit for this, particularly from the International Crisis Group, which virtually pirated my work for segments of the report (start at page 22 on). But, as Mr. Chinni notes, my “posts can sound a lot like government talking points filtered through war stories.” If so, what does that make the New York Times and the International Crisis Group?
Why, it makes them spokesmen for Roggio talking points, of course.
Bill Roggio calls things as he sees them. I’m glad he’s there reminding people that we are still at war with Al Qaeda, because there’s an emerging consensus that the government wants to abandon that war.
What the hell are “government talking points” these days?
Am I allowed to abandon them?