Surge?? What Surge???
Keith_Indy on Jun 21 2007 at 12:34 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Keith's Page, Media, Military Matters
According to the current headlines, (see below the fold,) the only thing worth mentioning in Iraq, is a suicide bomber that killed 13. Gee, I wonder what Michael Yon and Bill Roggio are getting all worked about then. I mean, it’s only being described as the biggest offensive operation since the spring of 2003. But, I guess, when you’re relying on Iraqi stringers, or worse, what you see out your hotel window in the green zone, you’re going to miss stuff like this…
Four days after the announcement of major offensive combat operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and its allies, the picture becomes clearer on the size and scope of the operation. In today’s press briefing, Rear Admiral Mark noted that the ongoing operation is a corps directed and coordinated offensive operation. This is the largest offensive operation since the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom ended in the spring of 2003.
The corps level operation is being conducted in three zones in the Baghdad Belts — Diyala/southern Salahadin, northern Babil province, and eastern Anbar province — as well as inside Baghdad proper, where clearing operations continue in Sadr City and the Rashid district. Iraqi and Coalition forces are now moving into areas which were ignored in the past and served as safe havens for al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent groups. As the corps level operation is ongoing, Coalition and Iraqi forces are striking at the rogue Iranian backed elements of Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army and continuing the daily intelligence driven raids against al Qaeda’s network nationwide.
UPDATE: To give some context on the area of operations…
Here is the current area of operations as detailed by Bill Roggio.
Here is Iraq, with the AO in red, and where the majority of violence has been occuring outlined in blue. You’ll also notice the 2 spots in the south, which are detailed in this NYT article as receiving military attention as well.
So it would seem, we are concentrating our efforts on where most of the violence is, and where most of the terrorists and insurgents are. We’ve made a very large ring around the city, an area roughly 8000 square miles. Thats about the size of New Jersey. (Updated to take into acct Najaf.)
Update II: One of the leads on the Time’s website: Turning on al-Qaeda in Baquba (H/T Hotair)
The news from the battle was good. That was no surprise: in a war like guerrilla war like Iraq, every engagement that can be described as a “battle” is inevitably won by the superior force, which is part of the frustration. Baquba, the capital of Diyala province just northeast of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda over the past year—between 400 and 500 al-Qaeda fighters were estimated to be in the city when the U.S. forces attacked on Monday, and now those who remain are surrounded, in a slowly tightening cordon. These sorts of operations have taken place multiple times in multiple cities during this war, to little effect—usually the terrorists slip away, as they did in Falluja in 2004, only to turn up elsewhere. That may well happen again this time. But there is one promising development in Baquba.
A lieutenant colonel named Bruce Antonia told Odierno about preparing to attack the Buhritz neighborhood a few nights earlier when he was approached by local Sunni inusurgents—members, they said, of the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades—who were streaming out of the neighborhood. “They said they’d been fighting al-Qaeda but had run out of ammunition and asked us to supply them. We told them, ‘Show us where AQ is and we’ll fight them.’” The insurgents did and the neighborhood was cleared.
A second lieutenant colonel named Avanulis Smiley picked up the story from there, “Sir, they’ve also showed us seven buried IED sites. They gave us specific information—description of the houses, gate color, tree trunks.”
After the briefing I asked Colonel Antonia if he’d asked the Sunnis why they had turned against al-Qaeda. “They said it was religious stuff,” he said. “AQI demanded that the women wear abayas, no smoking and they preached an extreme version of Islam in the mosque. They’d also spent the winter without food and fuel because of the violence al-Qaeda was causing. One guy said to me, ‘We fought against you because you invaded our country and you’re infidels. But you treat us with more dignity than al-Qaeda,’ and he said they’d continue to work with us. I’ve been involved in many operations here and this is a first—usually everybody’s shooting at us. This is the first time we’ve had any of them on our side.” (In web postings, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade has denied it is cooperating with the Americans.)
Headlines on AP/Yahoo right at this moment…
Egypt invites Mideast leaders to summit
Suicide bomber kills 13 in northern Iraq
U.S. nuclear envoy visits North Korea
More measures on stem cells expected
Crowd kills man after car hits child
2 girls kicked off Ore. bus for kissing
Atlantis prepares for return to Earth
Stolen Homer Simpson statue found
N.Z. couple can’t name their son ‘4real’
Sosa hits 600th HR against former team
Ohio Gov.: Stolen tape had taxpayer info
AFI again rates ‘Kane’ as top movie
Glacial lake vanishes in southern Chile
Sosa joins elite club with 600th homer
Deadly S.C. fire ambushed firefighters
Revelers welcome summer solstice
Bush eyes Blair for Mideast peace role
Giuliani: Joining Iraq group a mistake
2,300 schools face ‘No Child’ overhaul
Third crack found on Hawaii’s Kilauea
Bush vetoes embryonic stem cell bill
Bush camp balks at immigration change
Barker: Remarks not a Rosie endorsement
White House delays border passport rules
Broadbent co-stars in ‘Indiana Jones’
Sammy Sosa hits 600th career home run
King again: Theus returns to Sacramento
Estrogen may offer some heart benefits
Long-lived two-headed snake dies
CNN:
# 16 die in Iraq suicide truck bombing
# Japan: U.S. envoy Hill heads to North Korea
# Researchers 3-D simulate 9/11 WTC attack
# Mob kills passenger in car that hit child
# Doc: Most OK with embryo use | Stem-cell bill veto
# Atlantis’ heat shield cleared for landing
# Study: More people swallowed by sand than sharks
# Top colleges want out of U.S. News rankings
# SI.com: Sosa becomes 5th player in 600-HR club
# Aborigines banned from booze, porn
# Authorities tell pair not to name son ‘4real’
# Ticker: McCain: U.S. ignores, angers Latin America
# CNN Wire: Latest updates on world’s top stories
MSNBC:
Sphere: Related ContentMilestone for Sosa
Texas Rangers’ slugger hits 600th career home run vs. Cubs.
Journalists’ donations to politicians
Iraqi officials restless
Mayor’s office hit
Abbas and Olmert to meet in Egypt
Top U.S. nuclear envoy visits North Korea
Emaciated boys found in Baghdad orphanage Click to view video: “Abused children rescued from Iraqi orphanage”
Stranded migrants: ‘We can’t go back’
NASA checking Atlantis’ heat shield
WP: A ‘broken people’ in booming India
Two moms face charges in fire
Bryan Jennings put it this way on the Daily Show the other day (and I am paraphrasing). We have such tremendous success at the local levels, yet it seems to be almost immediately undone by mass attacks elsewhere. How do you report that sort of complexity, when a few areas are showing tremendous progress and gratitude, but people are still strapping explosives to their chests and ruining the work done elsewhere?
That’s the trick, isn’t it? Suicide attacks undo coalition progress — its difficult to avoid, especially when they (in cases like the Samarra bombings) represent such tremendous disruption on the cheap. So does it matter more that there is a major offensive in a neighborhood of Iraq, or that the sectarian violence elsewhere hasn’t yet been addressed?
I honestly can’t say. I don’t think it’s right to accuse the media of mendacity in this, as it’s not like these things (more suicide attacks) aren’t big deals. Scandal-mongering, perhaps, or yellow journalism — I could buy those. But there’s not much evidence yet that this new offensive/trickle/surge is going to accomplish much.
And remember: Yon and Roggio are just as biased and agenda-driven as the MSM… they just happen to come at it from the other side.
Hmm, I hope I’m not getting to snarky, but you seem not to have read about the scope of this operation. It is not limited in scope to “a neighborhood of Iraq.” And that’s the point.
If all the media is going to do is report on the latest disruption of progress, and not say much at all about what we are doing to interrupt the terrorist and insurgents plans, then, in the eyes of the general public, we must not be doing anything, and so, we are failing because there was A SUICIDE BOMBING.
Journalists and others seem to want to explain the lack and slant of coverage, because the situation is to complex to cover in depth in 30 seconds. GIVE ME A BREAK!!!
They can surely pull some airtime away from covering the latest bowel movements of celebrities to cover something that is truly important.
Joshua,
You have a point about the suicide bombing being more important than say, a small breakout by a Single Tiger tank during WWII. They do have an outsized effect.
Still, almost no comprehensive coverage of the largest offensive of the war? I don’t know if it is mendacity, laziness or what, but it is a problem. I would also suggest, that unlike the Samarra bombing, these attacks, if they are within an overall atmosphere of improvement in Baghdad, even if still inadequate and tenuous, primary outsized effect is on us, rather than through Iraqi’s generally. Whose fault is that?
Does the suicide bombing really matter more than the killing, capture and disruption of the insurgents and others? We underestimate the effect our actions have upon the opposition because they have not surrendered, because they can still launch suicide attacks, because of their ridiculous pronouncements, because of the false claim of whack a mole.
However, absent all of our efforts how many more would they be able to carry out, how many areas would be fully under their control. If we looked at all of this through their eyes, are they so unimpressed? I don’t think so, and we have seen much evidence that their resolve and faith ebbs and flows as well as ours. The largest reason for its sustenance is the belief that we will leave. Absent that, it would likely be a far smaller resistance.
We have seen that when we do make an apparent commitment more flock to us or the government, to whoever is fighting the insurgency, people switch sides. Yet we squander that with our fecklessness. So it does matter when we are given a distorted view.
If this operation does not improve things significantly, it will not change the distortion in coverage, though it will be used to justify it, as we have seen over and over again. Not only does it not justify the distortion, it in fact is part of the reason for our operations relative lack of success, though that “lack of success” should be said with a caveat. Just staying in the fight, keeping them from getting more control, more freedom of movement is as important to our eventual success as it is to them. Long periods of seeming lack of progress are important. Attrition does matter as groundwork continues to be laid. If the operation does no more than keep the enemy on its heels, unable to expand their power it does accomplish a lot as we consolidate ours. Of course, that implies time, and media coverage such as this makes it more likely we will not have it.
Kieth, that’s still a tiny area immediately surrounding Baghdad. Which is fine, I’m not saying it’s unworthy or whatever, but it’s a small area of Iraq.
And I think you’re being selective about who’s reporting. The America-hating Associated Press is talking about “intense gunbattles in the streets and around the main market district as U.S. and Iraqi forces sought to clear the city of al Qaeda fighters.” And while the CS Monitor hasn’t run a story directly on the offensive, it did post a length story about attempts by the military to foster religious reconciliation — hardly a hostile stance to take.
In light of this new offensive, do you think the major spike in attacks on the Green Zone is newsworthy? Or is that just enemy propaganda?
And today the New York Times today covered the fighting.
Of course it’s enemy propaganda. That’s what terrorism is all about — i.e. horrific attacks that scare the will to fight out of the targeted populous. The media covers these attacks relentlessly while barely paying attention to what are troops really are doing. A major offensive taking place should dominate the nightly news and the stories above the fold in every paper, but that is not the case. Which do you think gets more attention, Josh?
And then there’s the angle of every story. Attacks in the Green Zone are highlighted as set backs in the war and rarely, if ever, are such events identified as the terrorists seeking to grab headlines. Nobody is saying the media shouldn’t cover the bombings, but it would be nice if they would at least recognize how such things are used for propaganda, and how the MSM is quite complicit in spreading the word.
Lance, I gotta take issue with one thing: the whack a mole charge. Ambassador Crocker himself spoke of “whacking a lot of moles” with the new offensive, so it’s not entirely a spurious charge (though it does imply futility, which, I agree, is not at all a given).
Also, if the fighting is so intense and widespread, how would you suggest “comprehensive” coverage? All Yon and Roggio offer are anecdotes from the soldiers they happen to talk to; why this is more representative or accurate than the other anecdotes in other news stories on the fighting doesn’t immediately come to mind.
Michael, I don’t know how multi-page coverage in the AP and NY Times constitutes barely paying attention. It is a battle. No one knows how it is going to turn out. If it is irresponsible to report every single suicide bombing, wouldn’t it be similarly irresponsible to report every single little nuance of an ongoing battle? (I can imagine complaints of a report of, say, 14 U.S. casualties in 24 hours of fighting as similarly “propagandistic,” because it’s not sufficiently positive).
On a broader, perceptual level, I know that a lot of people – I consider myself among them – see this as just the latest plan of the dozen or so plans we’ve been presented with as “the key to solving Iraq.” It’s fatigue in a way, however unfair it may be. You tolerate trial and error (or “muddling,” as the Instapundit calls it) only so much until you conclude the people in charge simply have no idea what they’re doing and they’ve run out of ideas.
I first read Mao’s “On Guerilla Warfare” when I was in third grade. I have seen its lessons ignored again and again. We finally have men who are truly conversant with its lessons, the lessons of French Algeria, and other conflicts in charge on the military side. That doesn’t mean they will be successful, but the real reason is one identified by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che, and others. It is the ability of the guerrilla to turn the information battle to his advantage, all the more important in the modern media age. That aspect of the strategy and tactics is key, and suicide bombers, terror as a weapon and other techniques deserve the same jaundiced eye our reporters turn on our own political leaders.
It should also be taken into account in our media’s coverage. To report the way they do is not objective, even if they truly are attempting to do so. It is to allow oneself to be picked up like a weapon and used as such, all the while claiming to be acting impartially. If so, it is an impartiality based in ignorance and an unwillingness to know the truth. If our military was busy trumpeting an occasional disgusting success while on a daily basis losing every fight involving more than two or three men, with casualties running at above a 10 to 1 ratio, unable to mount any effective opposition to their opponents other than to continue existing, but the media concentrated only on their occasional atrocity as a sign of their effectiveness, we would be contemptuous of them. That they do it for our enemies is pretty pathetic.
It is also very damaging, just as the favorable and slanted coverage they used to give our forces during WWII and Korea (where we were in far more desperate straits) worked to our advantage. If favorable coverage helps, and all believe it does, then unfavorable and dismissive coverage hurts. Whether it is justified or not does not change that. I don’t believe downplaying the successes we have had, as frustrating as the inability to end this is, is justified, especially given the brutal and terrible nature of those who oppose us. A true view of the real state of the insurgency is rarely attempted, to truly paint their own plight and to always report based on the best assessment of their and our capabilities would make the war seem far more “winnable” if still distasteful. We might still choose to leave, but not because of the “impossible to defeat” myth that has sprung up around guerrilla warfare. In fact, guerrilla’s themselves are rarely able to achieve their aims, as both Mao and Ho Chi Minh understood. They failed in Vietnam, they failed in Algeria, other factors were the key in both places, and Mao would have predicted as much. That doesn’t mean they can’t succeed here, but if so, it is likely to be because we decided to let them, and the media is the prime conveyor of that message.
In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary … come again?
Updated to include a couple of maps, and the size of the AO to put things in context…
AO about the size of New Jersey.
Wait, so Kieth updates his post to include NYT coverage, while Michael complains the NYT isn’t covering it? I don’t get it.
And AO size is nice and all, but the rest test is force match up, which Roggio doesn’t have any info on yet — he estimates how many troops we’re throwing at the fighting, but information is scarce about what they’re facing.
That’s why I don’t put much stock in any of these initial reports – it’s easy to confuse forrests and trees.
Apparently you don’t. I never complained that the NYT isn’t covering it. What I pointed out is that they aren’t giving it anywhere near the same coverage as suicide blasts and IED explosions. If you’d click on the links I provided, you would see that there is nothing about Operation Arrowhead Ripper in the “top news headlines” while there are two headlines hailing bad news in Iraq:
At Least 12 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in 2 Days
Shiite Rivalries Slash at a Once Calm Iraqi City
The complaint is the context of the coverage and headlines. What sticks in peoples minds are what’s above the fold, not what you can dig up off the back pages.
This Reuters article is a good example of trying to present the facts in context.
Headline: U.S. troops set trap for militants near Baghdad
The current headline item at CNN is a perfect example: 12 U.S. troops killed over last 48 hours in Iraq
MSNBC has finally switched over to “Setting a ‘Trap’” w/ subtitle “15 troops killed in 3 days; military plans to set ‘trap’ to ‘eliminate’ militants” Wonder why they need the quotes around trap and eliminate. The editors must think people are ignorant and will believe that this operation will eliminate all militants and all violence.
From Michael Yon’s report:
So it looks like they’re trying to get some people there, but it’s very after the fact. The fact that the blogosphere has more man power than all the major news agencies covering the biggest operation since the invasion is damning indeed.
Hell, I’m not even seeing anything on the Times website. Where did you find the story, Keith.
Here’s the front page of the website, and this is today’s front page of the dead tree version (web version here). Nothing.
Joshua found it and posted the link above.
And that’s sorta my last point. We shouldn’t have to be digging to find news about a major US offensive.
Here’s something to consider: how much advance warning were reporters given of this major offensive? My guess is surprise would be an element Petraeus would want to conserve. Given how much the military has freaked out over OPSEC, and how much trouble “reporters” like Geraldo (he deserves the quote marks) have gotten in for inadvertently revealing important strategy and tactics, it shouldn’t surprise you guys that the MSM was left out of the loop. So if the reporters aren’t being told what’s going on, and they’re denied access, and they’re only now able to get people out there, what exactly is the problem?
This is striking me more as a consequence of the deeply adversarial attitude between the military and the press. If the military hates the press for playing gotcha and cuts most of them out, then how is it some dastardly conspiracy when they don’t cover actions? Also, if Yon is saying a Times reporter is there, but he hasn’t happened to have posted his report yet, again what is the problem? He’s dependent on editors and print space – papers are not blogs, and bloggers don’t necessarily face the same constraints on posting.
From Michael Yon’s coverage…
Well, the New York Times reporter knew enough to be in the area, as did Michael Yon.
And not for nothing, 2 days ago, Bill Roggio reported this:
And here’s Gen. Petraeus on the 16th at a press briefing:
I really wouldn’t want to be seen as an apologist for the main stream media. They are simply awful in some aspects on average days.
Oh, and maybe you’ll remember back to the beginning of the month when Petraeus said:
and…
That’s the thing that gets me. That the enemy is seeking to manipulate the media in order to convince us to quit the fight isn’t even a serious question. Of course they are. The alternative is their own destruction and certainly they understand this intimately. Yet the media, hyper-sensitive to being manipulated by the US military (and for the most part appropriately so), seems absolutely oblivious to being manipulated by the other side. I mean, a tool is a tool, right?
yours/
peter.
Updated with article from the Times. Funny, their reporter managed to know what was going on, and got on the scene. Also a very good article, with appropriate context and caveats.