WHY IRAQ IS ALREADY "LOST"--AND WHY WE DON'T KNOW IT

One of several  reasons I value highly the daily press review Undernews--edited by the excellent Sam Smith, a veteran independent D.C.-based journalist--is that, despite the brain-damaging quantities of U.S. and foreign media I ingurgitate, Sam always comes up with insightful facts and analysis I've missed. In the December 22 Undernews, for example, one finds a sharp-eyed piece on Iraq by Abhay Mehta of the large-circulation Indian newsweekly Outlook in its December 20 issue. Entitled "The End of Warfare," Mehta uses the fact that Fallujah has still not been "secured" by the U.S.-led forces some 50 days after the assault on that martyred city began as a prism through which to view the limits of American military might in a country hostile to U.S. occupation:

"Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of war, Fallujah has still not let itself be 'taken' to date. The mightiest military machine in history has met its match. A turning point in military affairs? The end of warfare, as practiced by the Americans - the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory?

"Fallujah per se, on the face of it, is not a strategic or a militarily significant target. It however represents the 'great challenge' to the US/UK's military occupation of Sovereign Iraq since April 2003.

"On the face of it, it appears as if none of these tactical/military objectives have been met, including, it appears, the desire to presumably meet Mr Satan, resident of Fallujah.

"As for the other very laudable and rationally quantifiable objectives including that of stuffing democracy into a city by simply obliterating it, all of these seem to be a bit astray. . .
"[Fallujah remains 'untaken"] despite being flattened (perhaps about 12,000 to as much as 20,000 homes out of an estimated 50,000 razed) by the application of, as US Army Gen. John Abizaid put it, 'more military power per square inch than anybody else on earth]....

"At the peak of the assault, the Americans held no more than 35-40% of Fallujah (largely the north on or around the 18th of November) Thereafter, they appear to have been steadily repulsed and in fact the coalition forces currently have been repulsed to where they were on November 13th or thereabouts and to the outskirts of Fallujah. . .

"Short of using a neutron or a nuclear bomb (the Americans did use chemical weapons in Fallujah), despite all efforts, what the Americans have been able to achieve is relatively little, if anything at all, even in the best case estimates of the official narrative...." I urge you to read the rest of Mehta's piercing analysis, which suggests why Bush's claims that we can "win" in Iraq are imperial fantasies, nourished by the bunkered blindness of the Pentagon's chiefs from the ignorant safety of their offices on the Potomac--far, far away from the Tigris and Euphrates.

The dining-tent bombing of the U.S. base at Mosul has blown Fallujah out of the U.S. mass media's news cycle--but before it did, can you remember hearing or reading as clear and plain-speaking account of our failure in Fallujah as this one from India? (Mehta's piece is proof again that it's quite useful to break out of our navel-gazing and insular nationalism and look at us as others in the world see us).

The largest chunk of Americans still get their war news through television--specifically from the simple-minded summaries on local TV news--so, as I wrote in this week's L.A. Weekly, it's no surprise that a majority in this country still believe we need to stick it out in Iraq until "democracy" is installed (at gunpoint) and the insurgents "defeated."

If you want to know why public opinion in Western Europe has been so overwhelmingly against the U.S. war in and occupation of Iraq, there’s one obvious answer: the difference in television news between theirs and ours. You can easily determine this for yourself: Spend a week watching the news broadcasts and TV magazines of the BBC, France2 and Deutsche Welle, all available on many U.S. cable systems. The footage of dead Iraqi babies and children — victims of U.S. attacks on "terrorists" — that you will regularly see on European public television is rarely aired on U.S. networks. The regular interviews in Iraqi hospitals with doctors recounting the slaughter of the innocents that show up on European news broadcasts aren’t often seen on the all-news cable networks here, let alone on the Big Three broadcast nets’ newscasts. Iraqis, of course, know this daily reality all too well — which explains their overwhelming hostility to the U.S. occupation. And why that occupation cannot succeed.

An on-the-ground study of Iraqi casualties between April and September by Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder newspapers demonstrated that "Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents." But you’re not told this by U.S. TV’s "embedded" reporters, who’ve traded their reportorial independence for access to the boom-boom footage that drives what Time magazine has labeled the "militainment" proffered by American television. In fact, embedded reporters are enrolled in what the Pentagon calls "information operations" — a counterpart to military operations designed to exact the rosiest possible picture of the U.S. occupation from accredited reporters. Those who don’t toe the Pentagon line, and who report negatively on the occupation of Iraq and the indiscriminate effects of U.S. forces’ combat there, are simply blacklisted.

The demagogic nationalism of Fox News, the ratings king, has dragged the other networks down to its level as they seek to win back lost viewers. In a must-read article on "Iraq, the Press and the Election" in the December 16 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Michael Massing dissects U.S. media coverage of Iraq with devastating effect. CNN, for example, he portrays as "careening wildly between an adherence to traditional news values on the one hand and a surrender to the titillating, overheated, nationalistic fare of contemporary cable on the other. In the end, CNN . . . offered the superficiality of Fox without any of its conviction."

No wonder our couch potatoes haven't grasped that there is no end in sight in Iraq. Senator Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, reported recently from  a tour of Iraq that he hasn’t talked to a single U.S. military commander who doesn’t believe the U.S. occupation will last "three, or five, or seven years more" at least (did I hear someone say the word "Vietnam"?). And the longer it lasts, and the more Iraqi civilians are consumed in the flames of that occupation, the more the mad mullahs who dream of returning the Arab world to the 12th century will find willing listeners for their brand of hysterical religious poison, fertilizing the terrain from which new suicidal martyrs--like those who blew up the soldiers of the only hyperpower's army in Mosul this week--will sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm. We cannot "win" in Iraq, any more than we could in Vietnam--but it will take Washington a long time to even begin to admit it....

MORE MUST READING: There's a sharp multi-parter, the first installment of which has just been posted on PersonalDemocracy.com, by Chris Nolan -- "MoveOn: No Longer a Startup or an Upstart" -- which dissects how "what started out as an on-line political revolution turned over the course of the election into little more than upbeat marketing chatter designed to keep the customers happy and paying...." Nolan's acute diagnosis provides fresh reporting and analysis that helps understand Marc Cooper's slicing up of MoveOn's mushy politics in the L.A. Weekly three weeks ago. I'm eager to read Nolan's second installment, due to be posted later today...