How to Lose a War!

The 5th Column: How our own media helps our enemies.

By Robert Farrow

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. -Mark Twain

“I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. – General William Sherman

Let’s set the wayback machine and pretend, shall we. Let’s pretend today’s media had been around in WWII and covered the attack on Pearl Harbor. ( …and lets pretend TV sets were common in 1941. ) So close your eyes and imagine a fuzzy black and white program as the announcer says…..

Announcer, “Thousands of American soldiers die in attack on our Pacific Naval Base. ”

A few seconds of the Pearl Harbor footage. Announcer states “the whole American defenses are in shambles as our fleet is at the bottom of Pearl harbor. The whole coastline is open to invasion.”

Next, the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto discussing how the attack on Pearl Harbor was necessary because it would protect Japanese access to oil and other raw materials needed for the Empire.

..switch to footage of American ships on fire, emphasizing this is a “major disaster for our forces.”

….more footage of dead Americans, and the announcer suggesting that war “was avoidable, and Roosevelt forced Japan’s hand.”

….Prime Minister Tojo discussed how the the attack was brought by American Agression and that “Greater East–Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere will benefit all Asians and stop abuses by western countries.”

Finally…..an image of a crying mother whose son died in the attack, which fades into an the American flag (to pretend they are patriotic,) with the announcer suggesting if this is really worth the price.

Sound Silly? How is this different then how the media portrays the war now??

I want to do more then add my two cents to Curt’s The Demise Of The MSM? and Getting The News From The Enemy, Update IV and Wordsmith’s The Information Shadow War, but also wanted to explore some of the larger implications of the trend they are reporting on. So let’s start by reviewing these articles again in brief.

Getting The News From The Enemy
Posted by Curt

Yesterday there were two incidents that I wrote about involving the use of enemy propagandists by our MSM. Now take a look at the latest “all hell is breaking loose” report on Iraq, from the AP of course:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Gunmen broke into two Shiite homes and killed 21 men in front of their relatives in an Iraqi village, police said Saturday, as Vice President Dick Cheney sought Saudi Arabia’s help in calming

Iraq after an especially violent week of sectarian violence. U.S. and Iraqi forces also killed 58 insurgents during fighting north of the capital, they said.

Baghdad remained under a 24-hour curfew two days after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad’s main Shiite district with a combination of bombs and mortars.

Another 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq on Friday. The chaos cast a shadow over the summit next week between Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Bush in Amman, Jordan.

[…]In Diyala province, a hotbed of Iraq’s Sunni-Arab insurgency, gunmen raided two Shiite homes Friday night. The attack targeted members of the al-Sawed Shiite tribe in the village of Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, according to a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his own security, as officials often do in the increasingly volatile province.

Earlier that day, rampaging militiamen burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the capital’s mostly Shia neighborhood of Hurriyah, police said. Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in the assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed a total of 25 Sunnis, including women and children, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

The U.S. military said Saturday that Iraqi soldiers securing the Hurriyah area had found only one burned mosque and could not confirm reports that six Sunni civilians had been burned to death with kerosene.

As we have learned quite well over the years the enemy will try to stir the pot with doctored photo’s or outright lies as Patterico documented. Now the story about those Sunni’s being burned alive appears to have been a fairy tale also.

WordSmith sums it up nicely

Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.

[…]The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.
from my friends at Flopping Aces

So we have a media that is openly using enemy propaganda as news sources. This is beyond sheer irresponsibility but actually very dangerous. It is in fact as dangerous as any action of the enemy. Why? The “news” is what too many Americans use to make decisions that directly affect the laws and leaders of this country. Is it any wonder why Jefferson once wrote:

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

~Thomas Jefferson
Stolen shamelessly from Wordsmith

So I ask again, how is this any different then how the media acts now as they knowingly give the lies of terrorists and enemies of the media and Democracy a voice in their paper? Journalism is dead……it has been for years….it lost us Vietnam and wants America to suffer another defeat by radical Islam. Again, if the MSM covered WWII, we would be speaking German. The times are very grave now….Personally, I think the times are as grave now then to Edward Grey in 1914 as the lights went out all over Europe. For we have a foe as dedicated, if not more so then the Nazi’s, who do not have a capital to take or a single leader to kill. This war will not end in 6 years, or even 60. And if we keep on listening to our defeatist media we all will be practicing Islam, whether we want to or not. Do you not think Bin Laden is not encouraged by our media? Giap was.

“We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn’t our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war.”

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow.

And how do you break the will of the people. You bombard them with negative news all the time. But they don’t need to worry about having to do this task themselves when they have our media working for them. If I were a terrorist, a sworn foe of democracy and of the media, then this is what I would have learned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. My manual of instruction for the terrorists would closely follow this wonderful Novak article and rely heavily on the media.

How to Defeat the US in Future Wars.

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war. Warfare is not, these days, won on a grand field of battle. Nor is it won by the force that wins series after series of military victories. Nor is triumph assured by killing far higher numbers of the enemy. The physical side of warfare no longer holds precedence.

The primary battlefield today lies in the minds of opposing publics.

The main strategic aim of war today is to dominate the mind of the enemy’s public, and then ultimately to dominate the mind of that public’s leaders.

Observe that the Cold War ended not in an explosion of unprecedented violence, but rather at the precise moment when the Soviet elites no longer believed. Observe that the Cold War ended not in an explosion of unprecedented violence, but rather atthe precise moment when the Soviet elites no longer believed their own storyline. Superior ideas cowed them, superior will, superior narratives. Quite suddenly, the invincible Soviet elites folded, accepted humiliation, allowed the Wall to come down, and watched in bitterness as hundreds of millions of formerly captive peoples chose new forms of government.

What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists’ best friends. Experience shows that the mainstream press of the United States is alienated from the U.S. military. In addition, the American press is extremely vulnerable to anti-U.S. propaganda. Thus, the American public will be fed nearly everything that foreign adversaries–our band of brothers–wish to feed it about the war. Therefore, I write: Maxim # 1: To defeat America, impose upon the imagination of its media your own storyline. Even if you can muster only 10,000 soldiers over the entire countryside of Iraq, paint the narrative like this: The Americans are irresistible occupiers, and yet they cannot prevent small (even individual) acts of destruction. Daily, unrelenting acts of destruction demonstrate that chaos rules. The American strategy, and the American storyline of the war, are invalidated by continuing chaos, highly visible, every single day, on worldwide television. The new dominating story is that the Americans cannot win.

Even though our own forces (for nearly two whole years now) can no longer afford to fight in a single operation lasting longer than a few hours, our martyr-brothers cannot be prevented from committing daily acts of destruction–the more stomach-turning the better–which demonstrate a ferocious will and a determination to destroy. In such wars, my brothers, whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins. To defeat the United States, then, it suffices to demonstrate that their vaunted military, for all its awesome power and tactical bravery in the field, cannot halt daily “chaos.” To achieve this victory over America, it is not even necessary to create actual “chaos,” but only its appearance. This definition of chaos cannot be made on cerebral, analytic, statistical, or comparative grounds. (In October the Times of London reported, “An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France” this year, with 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services and nearly 3,000 police officers injured. We don’t need comparisons like this or comparisons with traffic deaths and violent crimes in individual U.S. states.)

Besides, brothers, there seems to be a psychological tic in the minds of American journalists, which prevents them from understanding that our terror is ultimately aimed at them. Today, yes, they think it is aimed at their government, and will cripple their political opponents within that government. Without qualm or fear, therefore, they do our bidding day after day. Willingly, gleefully, with much self-congratulation, they pump our storyline into the bloodstream of the Western public. This is far easier than anyone ever taught us. This is our new discovery, our contribution to the history of warfare. Before our very eyes, the West grows fainter and weaker every day.

Maxim # 2: Take heart, then, my terrorist brothers! Bin Laden is even more correct than we knew before the last two years. The West does not have the will to resist. Those elites among them who do have the stomach to fight back, inexorably, day after day, are being undermined by their own media. Now and in the future, the media will do our work. All we need are martyrs sufficient in number to keep a steady stream of orange flames and black smoke before their cameras, and to dump before them bodies that are stone-cold dead, and bear all over them the unmistakable blue marks of power drills and other disfigurements.

Of such martyrs, we need each day only a handful. In 365 successive days, we need fewer than one thousand.
This small band of brothers can defeat the most powerful army in human history. The path, my brothers, is to come to dominate the minds of their public, which they must suppose is supporting them, and in reality turns quite quickly into our best ally.
By Michael Novak

So…is this article accurate? Is the media and thus our political leaders mirroring the political aim and psychology of the enemy. Here is one easy example taken from a plethora of examples to choose from.

Al Qaeda No. 2: Bush must admit defeat in Iraq

(CNN) — An Arabic language news network has aired a video of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant, in which he called on U.S. President George W. Bush to admit defeat in Iraq.

from the Communist News Network

which is mirrored nicely by…..

the “idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong,” Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean

This sad display of terrorists talking points was roughly mirrored by Murtha, Kerry, a whole host of Democratic leaders, and most of the articles found in our media, almost on a daily basis. How many articles found in the press in WWII mirrored Hitler’s or Tojo’s talking points? Hell, Ernie Pyle today probably would have been kicked out of the White House press corp or fired from CNN. Very, very few article of dissent have appeared. Why? Roughly, this country is evenly divided between people who lean Democrat and people who lean Republican. In contrast, we get our news from a group of people who are overwhelmingly Democrat and liberal.

· 81 percent of the journalists interviewed voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election between 1964 and 1976.

· In the Democratic landslide of 1964, 94 percent of the press surveyed voted for President Lyndon Johnson (D) over Senator Barry Goldwater (R).

· In 1968, 86 percent of the press surveyed voted for Democrat Senator Hubert Humphrey.

· In 1972, when 62 percent of the electorate chose President Richard Nixon, 81 percent of the media elite voted for liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern.

· In 1976, the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, captured the allegiance of 81 percent of the reporters surveyed while a mere 19 percent cast their ballots for President Gerald Ford.

· Over the 16-year period, the Republican candidate always received less than 20 percent of the media elite’s vote.

· Lichter and Rothman’s survey of journalists discovered that “Fifty-four percent placed themselves to the left of center, compared to only 19 percent who chose the right side of the spectrum.”

· “Fifty-six percent said the people they worked with were mostly on the left, and only 8 percent on the right — a margin of seven-to-one.”

from the Media Research Center

There are many articles that show the media is much more willing to write positive stories about Democrats rather then Republicans, and due to space, I will not list them. But this media bias has a dangerous affect on our economic, immigration, crime policies, and most dangerously, our military policies. All this because of the influence of group of people cut of from the average American and unable to notice his/her own bias because his/her peers share it.. And this bias and negative reporting towards Republicans led directly to the Democrat’s victory in the November election and lead to putting people like this fine person back in the drivers seat of our nation’s policies and future.

Rangel says men join the army only if they can’t have “a decent career”.

I want to make it abundantly clear: if there’s anyone who believes that these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment. If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

Would this do anything but encourage our enemies? So is it any wonder why al Qaeda was pleased the Democrats won:

The leader of Iraq’s al Qaeda wing on Friday gloated over forcing outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to flee the Iraqi battlefield and said his group would not rest until it blew up the White House. The Democrats’ victory at U.S. Congressional elections were a step in the right direction, the speaker said.

A step in the right direction? To what? Well, what does al Qaeda want? You know what they want?

Our Destruction.

Shouldn’t doing what they want bother us?

……. apparently not.

Even wanna-be genocidal jew killers like Iranian nutjob Ahmadinejad recognize who his friends are.

Ahmadinejad Writes to the Left
We have another letter from Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this time directed to the “American people”—or more accurately, aimed squarely at the moonbats, leftists, and mainstream media: Iranian president: ‘U.S. governs by coercion’.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a letter to the American people on Wednesday, accused their government of “coercion, force and injustice” and urged the United States to pull out of Iraq. Ahmadinejad’s five-page letter also called on Washington to recognize a Palestinian state and cautioned the Democratic Party that, after gaining control of the U.S. Congress, they would be “held to account by the people and by history.The letter was given to Reuters by Iran’s Mission to the United Nations.

The Iranian leader, who wrote an 18-page letter to President George W. Bush in May that Bush never responded to, said he was now writing to the American people in friendship because Iran and the United States shared a responsibility “to promote and protect freedom and human dignity and integrity.”

“Governments are there to serve their own people. No people wants to side with or support any oppressors. But regrettably, the U.S. administration disregards even its own public opinion and remains in the forefront of supporting the trampling of the rights of the Palestinian people,” he said. “It is possible to govern based on an approach that is distinctly different from one of coercion, force and injustice,” Ahmadinejad said.

On Iraq, he said that with a constitution and government now in place, “would it not be more beneficial to bring the U.S. officers and soldiers home, and to spend the astronomical U.S. military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and prosperity of the American people?”

from LGF

And this is the same guy who said:

Ahmadinejad: Muslims Must Act to Eliminate Israel.

LGF also notes in a new article reviewing the book: Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age by Jim A. Kuypers, assistant professor of communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech that gives further examples of “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.”

What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”This goes beyond reporting alternate points of view. “In short,” Kupyers explained, “if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech.” from LGF again

By the end of the book, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” And in many ways, it is. For this is the danger of the 5th column, otherwise known as our media. The media, by selective reporting, by lie via omission, by bias, and by blatant falsification, affects the perceptions and beliefs of this country and thus it’s leaders. Both Giap and radical Islam realize modern war is psychological and political, not physical. It is imagination, not reality. It is won in the TV sets and in the headlines, not on the battlefield. It is public perception, not the soldiers morale. Actual victory no longer matters. And the media is so biased, so twisted, so arrogant, so removed from any other view save it’s own, that it exists only to serve itself and it’s own liberal agenda, which is detrimental to this country.

Attacking your country at every turn. Willing to trust terrorists before your own soldiers. Aiding the enemies of Democracy and freedom of the press. That is not only how you destroy your own profession but your own country.