So what happened? When crunch time came in Iraq, the sort of suicidal prolongation-of-agony that Sandlin talks about simply, against reasonable expectation, failed to happen on any large scale (although we may be seeing its beginnings in Tikrit, where the Ba'ath party faithful who have the most to fear from the inevitable settling-of-accounts are bunkered: but by withdrawing and concentrating itself into a single city even as arrangements to install a civilian administration are being put into place, the Ba'ath party has essentially made itself irrelevant. Tikrit may persist for some time as a war zone inside a pacified country, in practical terms a separate conflict to the wider issues of reconstruction—within Iraq, but not of it).
So how did this come to be? How did Iraq manage to stagger-step outside the patterns of History, which may not exactly repeat itself, but has certainly been known to rhyme? Is this outcome a validation for the Pentagon strategy, that instant cliché "shock and awe," itself an extension of the Powell Doctrine of "overwhelming force"?
Well, yes and no. Overwhelming Allied force was in evidence in WWII also, but was not in itself enough to bring the Axis to heel, not enough to prevent or override the "collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster" that led the fascist powers to continue their war effort long past any point of diminishing returns.
The factor that has made the most difference in this war, I think—the true "overwhelming force" at play—is Information.
This war, more than any previous, even more than Gulf War I, has been mass-communicated. The Internet, which wasn't really a player in Desert Storm, was a primary source of war info this time around, with 24-hour live camera streams, minute-by-minute newsfeed updates, and warblogging from inside Iraq: and of even greater importance, psychologically, al-Jazeera was there to provide reporting that could not be reasonably accused of pro-American bias.
Information is not the same as Truth, of course: but if nothing else the vast flow of raw information coming out of the war zone proved the limits of spin control. You can spin the meaning of the facts, but the facts remain that metric fuckloads of Iraqi military targets were getting blown to bits with minimal losses of Coalition materiel, that lots of Iraqis were dying and lots of Coalition soldiers, well, weren't—in short, that Iraqi victory was in no way just around the corner. Whether you characterized this state of affairs as a liberation of an oppressed people or as an imperialist aggression, as a victory for democracy or as a defeat for pan-Arabism, you had to consider the same set of facts—and those who attempted to deny those facts outright were laughed out of town (even as you had to chuckle at their chutzpah).
This makes me think that perhaps the "dreamy paper war" is finally a thing of the past—that it was unrelenting, ubiquitous media coverage—from hostile, friendly, and neutral sources, all saying the same thing in different ways—that really turned the tide in this war, simply by making it impossible to take refuge in the fantasy of a sudden reversal of fortune.
So yeah, the Fourth Estate won this war, for good or ill.
You know, just to give the filthy journos another reason to feel self-important.
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