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November 15, 2005
Media as Weapon, not Theatre
The Officers' Club addresses the idea of the media as an instrument of war, but Brian points out in the comments something that is vitally important to understand, and often lost on bloggers: the media is not a theatre, but a weapon. (hat tip: InstaPundit) This is a fact often lost on bloggers, who tend to view the media as a thinking enemy of the US.
To an extent, that view is correct: many in the media seem to be actively working against the US war effort. But that view is not complete: the media has motives, incentives and goals beyond simple anti-Americanism or transnationalism, and the media is not a unified body, either. It is precisely these different motives, incentives and goals that jihadis exploit: frequent bombings on the road to the Baghdad airport tweak reporters' incentives to show spectaculars, while the fact that the road has been safe for many months now has not been worthy of a single report, so far as I can tell. Similarly, by attaching the victim label to themselves, the jihadis get a free pass on atrocities, while by not being the victim, the US is blamed even for the acts of the jihadis. (This happens in domestic politics as well.)
To really understand how the press can be used as a weapon of the West, though, you have to understand one key fact: the only way to defeat an enemy (in the strategic sense) is to defeat his will to fight. The only way to defeat an enemy's capacity to fight is to kill him, if necessary to the last man. In practice this pretty much never happens, because human willpower is not infinite. As the Iraq campaign shows, even an enemy incapable of resisting on conventional ground can, if he is determined enough, continue fighting long after any rational analysis tells him he can prevail. Even at the very end of WWII in Europe, with all of Germany in flames, there were millions of Germans who could have taken up arms, and the arms were available. But the Germans had lost their will to resist. Indeed, the German people and even military would probably have been willing to surrender much sooner, but one of the drawbacks of totalitarianism is the inability of the people to bend the leaders' wills.
So to make the enemy stop fighting, or never fight in the first place, requires you to defeat the enemy's will to fight. For less rational enemies, like the Nazis or the jihadis, this is a task that requires the almost complete destruction of the enemy. For more rational groups, like the US or the Germans of WWI, once you demonstrate to them that winning is not possible, there is generally a point at which a negotiated settlement is preferable to continued fighting. Note that you don't have to convince a rational actor that he will lose a fight, only that he will not win it, to eventually force him to concede the field. This is, at its heart, the way that the jihadis use the press (and the way that anti-Americans, anti-capitalists and anti-Republicans in the press itself use the press): as an attempt to defeat our will to fight. Hence the boasting price; hence the videotaped beheadings; hence the endless accusations of the evil nature of all Americans and American institutions; hence the endless comparisons to Viet Nam. All of this makes using the media as an aid to war, or even neutralizing its effect, difficult for Americans in general and almost impossible for Republicans.
But we don't have to necessarily win the same way our enemies do. All we have to do is show ourselves to be strong enough to not lose our will because of excessively negative press coverage; that is, to convince the enemy that the press is not a sufficient weapon to defeat us. We don't have to use the media ourselves as a weapon, though it would be nice if we did, since it would shorten the war. That is why the 2004 election was so important: it denied a significant hope of the enemy. And the 2006 and 2008 elections will be important for the same reason. If the enemy comes to believe that he cannot defeat our will, then his own will will be weakened. In combination with the morale losses from field attrition, and the loss of supporters as media stunts staged for the West, like the attacks in Amman, result in a loss of respect among the semi-neutral Muslims the jihadis want to recruit, the enemy will have a very difficult time maintaining his will to fight, and many of the enemy's fighters will in fact stop fighting.
In the end, there are still jihadis who will only stop fighting when they die, but I suspect that that number is not sufficient to maintain an international campaign against us, and that the jihadis' will can be beaten sufficiently to not necessitate actually hunting down and killing each of the most fanatical of the enemy. Or if we do, it will be more like the Israeli hunt for Nazis than it will be like open warfare.
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