Wrong way war Don Murray Wav gid Media Relations: the US. Miliary and the Press from Vietnam to Iraq, by Thomas Rid (Routledge, pp226, ~The idea is like a pair of glasses on our nose through whieh we see whatever we look at. Ieneveraccurs to us to take them off” Donald Rumsteld may wish he had authored that rather gnomie statement, but he didn’t. ‘The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that in 1945 and Thomas Rid has chosen it as the epigraph to launch his analysis of War and Media Relations. It iscertainly apt. Rid’s review of the past four deeades shows a large and lethal organisation struggling to see through distorting lenses, finally flinging them olf and facing the world anew only to discover it’s now looking the wrong way His chapter headings tell the story n shorthand: disastrous public affairs affairs: Vietnam: restrictive publi Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf experimental publicaflairs Somalia, the Balkans and Afghanistan: strategic publicatfairs — frag. The thesis, developed Irom the tirst page, is that Vietnam was the trauma from which alll future decisions regarding the Pentagon's approach to the media Hlowed.and the implicit message in those headings ~ disastrous, restrictive, experimental, strategic ~ is chat the military philosophers in Washington have climbed from the slough of despond and disaster toa plateau of considerable success in Irag,at least in dealing with the press Along the way a couple of Figures illustrate how wars and the world have changed. In 1968 in Saigon there were 637 accredited correspondents during the Tet offensive. In 2003 there were more than 775 journalists embedded. with the coalition troopsas the invaded Iraq. And more than 2,500 were registered with the American military, waiting, watching and covering in neighbouring countries War in the modern age had become a global contest watched by the world in time. Contrast that real-time coverage with pool coverage in the Gulf War of 1991, According to Rid’s research, only afitth of the pool reports arrived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in less than 12 hours. And then they still had to be “processed” in Washington of elsewhere. The result was that 69 per cent of the articles took more than a day to get published. Every renth story took more than three days to find its way into print, All the press reports on the biggest battle of thar war, one of 8 the biggest tank battles in militaryINNOQ St 90 tell ys-later category. And history — the Bartle of 73 Eastin di nota single picture, still or moving, into thar thre exists of that American vietory: “The news was low priority,” said thearmy official in charge of that pool. A breathtaking understatement ase of that, Rid presents the “embedding” of so many Perhaps be journalists in che [rag invasion as a triumph, the triumph of a bureaucracy capable of changing its ideas. Heals offers the intriguing thesis that the Pentagon’s most senior generals embraced embedding asa way of det iching support for Your troops” from ar. He quotes Rear support forthe Admiral Terry McCreary, the public affairs assistant co the chairman of the Joint Chief’ of Staff, as recognising that the American public was split down the middle on the war. ‘The consumer should be able to say, in MeCreary’s words: “OK, [ike this war, [hate this war, but I really feel that these troops are doinga dann fine job.” Equally intriguing is the revelation that this distinction was never discussed with Sceretary of Defense Rumsteld, or any of his senior civilian officials. How great was this bureaucratic triumph? Rid puts it this way: “Belore reporters wereembedded with units in the battletield, the media bad been embedded conceptually into the war plan.” Elsewhere he quotes colonel planning combat operations at division level as happily confirming that his embedded reporters were used as part of ions” —inother the “information ope words, as unwittingagents putting out information to destabilise the enemy But so focused is Rid on the Pentagon triumph in this battle that he all but misses the war, the real war that stretched on for more than four years after the Ameri ‘an forces got to Baghdad. ‘There are just ten pages ina final chapter, entitled “The adversarial learning loop” —the book is sprinkled with whole chapters of such sociological jargon —and even these pages largely avoid the occupation, its disasters and its impact on relations between the armed forces and the media, Rid devotes almost all his spac to theeyher-space warand talks only of al-Queda and jihadists as the adversaries of Americans. Not 2 line is devoted to Iraqi insurgents fighting to remove the occupiers from theit country. Nor is there so much as a sentence on the rivalry between the American military and the Coalition nd the impact that rivalry had on the media’s ability Provisional Authority a tocover the conflict. For that you have to turn toa book such as Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks. And the astonishing conelusion on the book's penultimate page is that, in daand the the battleagainst al-Qa have been jihadists, the media “focusing lop-sided criticism too quickly on infringed press freedoms... Reporting the facts can mean helping nd the odds are high thac the facts will mean helping ‘one part reporting the non-democratic party”. Like the institution it cracks, this book seems to be looking the wrong way. Don Murray 164 renior correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and bas covered the conflicts in Lrag, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia