Who 'Lost' Fallujah? Marines Or Media?

[thedrifter]

Who 'Lost' Fallujah? Marines Or Media?
Ibd


Media And War: As the battle for Fallujah raged during 2004, the world's media gave it front-page treatment -- almost all of it negative. Now U.S. intelligence analysts say the media deserve some blame for the setback there.

A report looking back at the first battle of Fallujah, which led to a U.S. withdrawal of forces from that city, concludes that a major reason for the U.S. retreat wasn't military incompetence or an unbeatable foe; no, it was the media.

"The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion -- coalition victory," according to a report from the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center.

"But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. ... The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations."

That halt, by the way, meant more U.S. troops were killed in pacifying Fallujah than necessary. The first battle for Fallujah began on April 4, 2004, and ended five days later. The U.S. had to wait six months before going back to finish the job.

Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two Arabic satellite news channels, carried extensive coverage of the battle. They took pictures of dead babies in Fallujah's hospital, "presumably killed by coalition airstrikes," though no proof was ever offered.

"Children were shown bespattered with blood," the report said. "Mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day."

Many of those Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya reports were uncritically echoed by the Western media, both in the U.S. and Europe. It led to extreme pressure on the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority to halt the Marine attacks on the city of 285,000.

Here, for example, is how The New York Times put it in its April 5, 2004, edition: "Together, the events in Fallujah and the other cities on Sunday appeared likely to shake the American hold on Iraq more than anything since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's government last April 9." And that wasn't at all untypical.

In fact, the U.S. Marines entering Fallujah did take casualties and met heavy armed resistance. But without the misleading media coverage that led to political pressure, they would have almost certainly cleaned out what had become a viper's nest of terrorist activity.

When the Marines returned to retake Fallujah in November 2004, they brought with them some of the embedded reporters -- media folks who, to their credit, understood what was going on at the troop-level and were generally far less biased in their coverage. The Marines took Fallujah, and today it's largely quiet.

Just as the media overplayed the troubles the U.S. was having in Iraq early in the war, today they're downplaying the extraordinary successes since the start of the 30,000-troop surge in 2007.

This has given Democratic presidential candidates a chance to keep quiet about Iraq -- an issue on which they were dead wrong.

A New York Times headline put it best Thursday: "On Campaign Trail, Domestic Issues Now Outweigh Iraq." Depends on who's doing the weighing, we guess.

Just five months ago, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were pushing hard for legislation to force the U.S. to pull out of Iraq, even as we were winning the war. They were wrong, but the mainstream media have largely given them a pass.

Also recall that, just four months ago, congressional Democrats ripped Gen. David Petraeus for telling them the surge was working. That month, as the Media Research Center noted, the three major networks did 178 stories on Iraq -- many of them negative in tone.

"Victory is not at hand," said CBS News' David Martin in one typical report, "not even in sight." Others said much the same thing.

Since then, U.S. casualties have plunged (see chart), amid growing signs of political compromise. Now the networks have grown strangely silent on Iraq.

Maybe the media, proven so wrong, hope the Iraq issue will just go away. Surely the Democrats do. Unfortunately for both, it won't.

Ellie

[OLE SARG]

The media here in the good ole U. S. of A. is out of control!!!!!!! I believe little of what I hear spewed by the media and very little of what I read in the rags.

SEMPER FI,

[thedrifter]

WHO LOST FALLUJAH?

By Ed Morrissey

According to the Washington Times, the military reviewed the loss of Fallujah to Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in 2004 to determine how the US lost control of the city. The Marine Corps should have beaten the terrorists in a straight up fight, but the Pentagon believes that the enemy had a lot of help from a surprising source -- surprising for everyone except those who watched it happen in real time:
"The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory," read the assessment, prepared by analysts at the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC.

"But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. ... The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations," concluded the assessment. ...

The authors said the press was "crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations," from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a "unilateral cease-fire" by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations.

During the negotiations that followed, top Bush administration officials demanded a solution that would not require the Marines to retake the town, according to the assessment.

What happened? During the initial effort to retake Fallujah in April 2004 -- following the brutal murders of four Blackwater contractors -- Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya began broadcasting propaganda that Western media immediately repeated. The two Arab news services showed video of babies in hospitals and claimed the Marines had wounded these and killed more. Both channels made explicit comparisons to the Palestinians, and the American and European press ate it up.

The propaganda efforts worked. The Marines withdrew and the terrorists made Fallujah the center of their oppression over the people of western Iraq. It took months for the US to mount another offensive, this time with media embeds to counter the propaganda that the Western press seemed eager to indulge. In November 2004, the US finally cleared Fallujah, but not before losing a lot of credibility with the Iraqis who felt abandoned to the terrorists.

This is just a repeat of the Peter Arnett story. In the first Gulf War, Arnett famously repeated without any hint of skepticism the notion that the US bombed a baby-milk factory instead of a weapons factory. Years later, Eason Jordan would admit that CNN cooked its reporting to curry favor with Saddam Hussein, and would occasionally just read copy into the camera provided by the Saddam regime as though it was CNN's own. Rather than treat the Al-Jazeera propaganda with any skepticism at all, the Western media instead regurgitated it while insisting that American military sources could not be trusted to provide honest accounting of the fight.

We saw this at the time, and tried to point out the contradictions. It cost the lives of American Marines and soldiers, and it cost many more Iraqi lives. The media lost Fallujah, and had it not been for the determination of the Bush administration, they would have lost the entirety of Iraq to al-Qaeda terrorists as well.

Washington Times
Article published Jan 2, 2008
Press, political pressure helped 'lose' Fallujah, report says


January 2, 2008

By Shaun Waterman - UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

A secret intelligence assessment of the first battle of Fallujah shows that the U.S. military thinks that it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to "political pressure" that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents.

"The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory," read the assessment, prepared by analysts at the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC.

"But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. ... The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations," concluded the assessment.

It added that the decision to order an immediate assault on Fallujah, in response to the televised killing of four contractors from the private military firm Blackwater, effectively prevented the Marine Expeditionary Force charged with retaking the town from carrying out "shaping operations," such as clearing civilians from the area, which would have improved their chances of success.

A copy was posted on the Web last week by the organization Wikileaks, which aims to provide a secure way for whistleblowers to "reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations," and says it favors government transparency.

Although a spokesman for U.S. Army intelligence declined to comment on the document, United Press International independently confirmed its veracity.

The authors said the press was "crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations," from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a "unilateral cease-fire" by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations.

During the negotiations that followed, top Bush administration officials demanded a solution that would not require the Marines to retake the town, according to the assessment.

Crucial to the failure, the authors said, was the role of the Arabic satellite news channels Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

An Al Jazeera crew was in Fallujah during the first week of April 2004, when the Marines began their assault on the city of 285,000 people.

"They filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by coalition air strikes," the assessment said. "Comparisons were made to the Palestinian intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day."

By contrast, the assessment stated that later in 2004, when U.S.-led forces successfully retook Fallujah, they brought with them 91 embedded reporters representing 60 press outlets, including Arabic ones.

"False allegations of non-combatant casualties were made by Arab media in both campaigns, but in the second case embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal," the authors said.

Ellie