The Arab-language media was instrumental in building the pressure that led the Bush administration to reverse course and halt the assault:
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.
When the media can bend reality, I don't know why our press wonders why supporters of the military distrust them as a group? Sure, this report was about Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, but when much of our press writes as if they have no personal interest in our victory and even seem to want our defeat, the military-press gap will lead to distrust of reporters.
I will say, to our media's credit, that in the Second Battle of Fallujah the report credits the Western reporters with rebutting new charges of excessive civilian casualties.
As a word of caution, it is certainly possible that we judged our support among the Shias as too weak to really continue the offensive in the face of the negative and inaccurate news coverage. Remember, this was just the beginning of the Baathist-jihadi alliance that alienated Shias and drove them to support us. Before the summer of 2004, the Shias remembered our abandonment of them in 1991 after they rose up against Saddam. While happy Saddam was gone, they weren't ready to trust us again. After the enemy attacks lasting from April to August 2004, the Shias stopped blaming us for bombings and started blaming Sunni Arabs.
Before our real-time 24/7 media, it used to be the case that the winners wrote the history. Now, those who wish to shape the outcome write the instant history. Of course, when we tried to shape the instant history by paying Iraqi papers to print true stories we wrote, we just get slammed for it.
