If it weren't for Internet access to
troops, expatriates and Iraqis in Iraq, you would think that coalition
military operations in Iraq were a major disaster, and that prompt
withdrawal was the only reasonable course of action. But the mass media
view of the situation is largely fiction, conjured up in editorial
offices outside Iraq, with foreign reporters in Iraq (most of them
rarely leaving their heavily guarded hotels) providing color
commentary, and not much else. So what do the troops and Iraqis say?

First,
there is definitely a terrorism problem. Not an insurgency, not a
guerilla war, not a resistance. A portion of the Sunni Arab population
refuses to recognize the Sunni Arab loss of power in early 2003. They
are supporting a campaign of terror to either get back power or, more
pragmatically, to get immunity for most Sunni Arabs for crimes
committed during Saddams decades in power. The majority of support the
terrorists get is from the amnesty crowd. Hundreds of thousands of
Sunni Arab families have one or more members who did Saddam's dirty
work. That has left millions of Kurds and Shia Arabs looking for
revenge. Remember, this is where the legal concept of  "eye-for-an-eye"
was invented thousands of years ago. The children of Hammurabi want
their measure of vengeance, and if they get it, the current violence in
Iraq will look pallid by comparison. All the prevents a wholesale
descent into mutual slaughter is the presence of coalition troops. In
other parts of the world (and there are many to examine at the moment)
this sort of thing is called peacekeeping. Withdraw the peacekeepers,
and what  peace there is  goes with them. 

Second, there is
a cultural crises, in the Arab world in particular, and the Moslem
world in general. The crises is expressed by a lack of economic,
educational and political performance. By whatever measure you wish to
use, Nobel prizes, patents awarded, GDP growth, the Arabs have fallen
behind the rest of the world. Part of the problem is the Arab tendency
to  blame outsiders, and to avoid taking responsibility. Tolerating
tyranny and resistance to change doesn't help either. That is changing,
and the war in Iraq has become the center of this cultural battle. It
began with the 2003 invasion, which was reported by the Arab media as a
great defeat for the Western "crusader" army. Until, that is, it was
all too obvious that American troops had battled their way to Baghdad
in three weeks, and were quickly defeating Iraqi forced defending this
cultural capital of the Arab world. This triggered a debate in the Arab
world, one that got little coverage in the West. It began when some
Arab journalists openly pointed out, in the Arab media, that Arab
reporters had not only been writing fantastical stories that had no
relationship to reality, but that this sort of thing had been going on
for a long time and, gosh, maybe it had something to do with the sorry
state of affairs in the Arab world. That particular debate is still
going on, largely unnoticed in the West. This is the real war against
terrorism, because the terrorists represent the forces of repression
and backwardness in the Arab world. 

Third, the bad guys
are really, really bad, but they have many prominent allies around the
world. Most Iraqis cannot understand how so many media outlets in the
West can keep giving favorable coverage to the Sunni Arab terrorists.
These guys are butchers, and many used to work for Saddam, committing
the same kind of mayhem. Yet these European reporters come looking for
Sunni Arab "victims" of "American imperialism." How strange is that?
Nothing strange, just another cultural quirk. The Europeans are much
more risk averse than Americans. We all remember the 1930s, where most
of Europe left Hitler alone, hoping that they could talk sense into
him, or that he would go away. Eventually, the good people of Europe
(at least those that had not been conquered by the Germans) had to
fight the nazis. Americans, most of them descendents of refugees from
European foolishness, wanted no part of this latest chapter. But the
Japanese and Pearl Harbor intervened, and there we were. After that,
Europeans had to deal with another of their inventions, communism. This
one had also started off in a promising fashion, but had eventually
descended into mass murder and tyranny. Still, many Europeans remained
fans, at least from a distance, and defended it until communism
collapsed in a pile of contradictions and dead ideas. Europeans have a
thing about tyranny. While not wanting it for themselves, they are more
willing than most to tolerate it for others. Thus the disagreement over
going after Saddam. Many Europeans believe that taking down Saddam was
just wrong, and continued American peacekeeping in Iraq just compounds
the error. Europeans had made their peace, and many business deals,
with Saddam. And the Americans went in and screwed it all up. Europeans
have been screwing things up far longer than Americans, and consider
themselves experts. They are unhappy that the Americans do not follow
the lead of Europe in these matters. Moreover, Europeans cannot accept
that they could be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary. This is
a major component of European cultural superiority. 

And,
lastly, we have the major differences between the media version of
what's going on, and the military one. The media are looking for
newsworthy events (bad news preferred, good news does not sell, and
news is a business). The military sees it as a process, a campaign, a
series of battles that will lead to a desired conclusion. The event
driven media have a hard time comprehending this process stuff, but it
doesn't really matter to them, since the media lives from headline to
headline. For the military, the campaign in Iraq has been a success.
The enemy, the Sunni Arabs, have been determined and resourceful. But
the American strategy of holding the Sunni Arabs at bay, while the
Kurds and Shia Arabs built a security force capable of dealing with the
Sunni Arab terrorists, has worked. But that's good news, and thus not
news. But every terrorist attack by Sunni Arabs is news, and gets
reported with intensity and enthusiasm.

But in
the end, process usually wins. News events are often turned into
obstacles. Journalists understand that their audience generally has no
memory for past reporting that was inaccurate. What is of the moment
takes precedence in peoples minds. Politicians play the same game,
rewriting history freely, secure in the knowledge that their followers
will go along with the revisions, and their opponents will have to play
the news event game to score any points with the undecided. Human
nature being what it is, the majority of the population pays little
attention to the buzz of news, unless, like an outstanding TV or radio
commercial, some journalist comes up with an event that registers big
time. This changes perceptions, for a while at least, and often creates
an artificial reality in the minds of many. This time, it isn't quite
working that way. The troops can email back their experiences promptly,
and this causes a disconnect in many people, between what they see in
the news, and what they are hearing from people who are in the middle
of it all. How all this will play out is as yet unknown, which is what
makes it so interesting. There's more going on in Iraq than a war.