DEAN BARNETT HERE, ANNOYED WITH THE MEDIA:

In the last three wars involving the Free World vs. the Terrorists, the media have described each war with the exact same pathetically off-base narrative.  It goes something like this:

PART I:  Panic.  We’re stuck in a quagmire!  The obstacles are insurmountable!  Victory is unachievable.

Readers with good memories will recall that was the story line a week into both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.  A few weeks later, the unachievable had been achieved – the governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq were soon topples.  If the media were accurate in determining what’s truly impossible, the creation of a perpetual motion machine would be imminent.

PART II: Ignorant second guessing of military strategy.  And I mean “ignorant” here in a strictly non-pejorative sense.  The people who were saying America’s plan to eliminate the Taliban was hopeless didn’t have the vaguest familiarity with either military history or modern tactics.  What’s more, they didn’t see the need to consult experts or do any reading to get themselves up to speed.  They heard about Vietnam; they figured they could recognize a military fiasco when they saw one.

PART III: Self flagellation.  This is the ugliest part of the narrative.  Here, the focus shifts entirely away from the depravities of the enemy, both those achieved and those intended, and moves exclusively on to the damage done by the forces of freedom.  A war photographer begins every day at a Gaza morgue to record the death poses of slain Palestinians.  An unhinged blogger focuses on a handful of miscreants at an out-of-control prison facility.  Tales of collateral damage are eagerly gathered and breathlessly reported.

Meanwhile, every sense of proportion is lost.  The fact that Hezbollah has sent almost 2,000 rockets into Israel, each one bearing the sole purpose of murdering civilians, is hardly considered.  Reuters reports that a Lebanese official puts the financial damage wrought by the IAF at $2 billion.  Not only does Reuters predictably decline to ask for any details supporting this assessment, they also apparently don’t care to ask how much financial damage has been done to Israel by Hezbollah’s rockets.

PART IV: Whoops! Afghanistan was supposed to be the burial ground of empires.  Whoops!  Saddam could not be toppled without fierce block-by-block street fighting, the kind that American forces couldn’t do well at.  Whoops!

And now the narrative is that Israel is doing poorly with Hezbollah.  The media has conferred upon Hezbollah the same aura of invincibility once worn by the Taliban.  They are fierce and determined, well trained by their Iranian mentors.  They are dug in.

Alas, Hezbollah will be defeated and defeated completely before this war is done.  Regardless of the nature of Israel’s leadership, the Israeli body politic will settle for nothing less.  One can imagine the near-unanimous sentiments of the American citizenry if our country were subjected to constant rocket attacks by a foreign entity.  We would demand that entity’s destruction, and the government, to maintain its legitimacy as the representative of the people, would have no choice to comply.  Even a President Kerry would be forced to fight fiercely under such circumstances.

Of course the authors of the narrative never say “Whoops!” or admit error.  They just blithely move along to their next blunder.

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