Recently, I received an email from a senior enlisted man with whom I'd served in Iraq. He wanted to know if I would be returning soon to cover the war. He expressed disappointment after I told him I was busy with other projects. "Short of Ollie," he said, referring to retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of FOX News, "you are one of the very few journalists we can trust."1
I thanked him, but the compliment bothered me. After all, conventional wisdom in many military circles holds that the media will be at fault if the United States fails to stabilize Iraq. At a dinner for Marine Corps combat correspondents in September 2006, General James Conway, now the Commandant of the Marine Corps, expressed the views of many officers while extolling the virtues of U.S. Marine reporters. "Maybe if we could get the rest of the media to do the job like you folks," the general said, "we might have a chance at winning the war."2
I cringed as the audience cheered and hooted. Almost four years ago, I worked for General Conway in Fallujah as a Marine officer, and I respect him a great deal. But in this case, the Commandant—and those who think like him—are wrong. The American press corps will have no significant impact over the final outcome in Iraq.
I'm in a rare position to render that verdict. After returning, I exchanged my pistol for a pen, pursuing the rigors of a writer's life instead of those of an infantry captain. I thought there were too many partisan reports that were either jingoistic or intolerably despairing. Better to offer a hand at a solution, I thought, than waste energy cursing a problem.
Why Is the Press Blamed?
General Conway's beliefs, and presumably those of others, are borne from a historical association with the role of the press in firing up Allied spirits and defending American righteousness during World War II against the Axis. Sixty-five years ago, Soldiers were rallied by movies from Frank Capra after they were drafted, front-line dispatches from Ernest Hemingway when they arrived in Europe, and political cartoons from Theodor Seuss Giesel when they passed through New York. America's foremost newspapermen and literati saw patriotism as a noble aspiration, and rallied for the morality of their cause both at home and abroad.
In the United States, the best known and most revered correspondent was Ernie Pyle. His wartime dispatches that tied America's heartland to their hometown heroes presented a stark, unvarnished, yet noble portrait of the infantrymen who slugged out victories in Europe and the Pacific. Pyle's influence over morale in America during World War II was immeasurable: Time called him "America's most widely read war correspondent," and in 1944 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Soldiers found their spirits buoyed by his presence. "My men always fought better when Ernie was around," said General Omar Bradley.3
Another less heralded, but no less significant, inkslinger for the American cause was John Steinbeck. After a 1939 trip to Latin America, the author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men was disturbed to discover that Nazi propaganda was globally superior to that of the Allies. In response, Steinbeck wrote The Moon Is Down, an anti-fascist novella that was translated into every language in occupied Europe; possession of the book in Axis-controlled territory meant death.
His novella provided the era's strongest literary moral justification for violent resistance to Nazi occupation.4 The writer also volunteered to work for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) between 1940 and 1942, later becoming an Atlantic theater war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.
From a military-political perspective, Pyle, Steinbeck, and others like them made three strategically useful contributions. Reporters reinforced the bond between the Soldier and the citizen; their very presence indicated that the nation was all in this together, committed to victory until the journey ended (Pyle died in April 1945 while on a patrol in Okinawa). Articles were censored in a way that would strengthen public morale, leaving out unflattering details that might weaken the people's resolve. And American writers like Steinbeck provided to a needy audience abroad important literary defenses of the moral purpose for that war.
A New World of Information
Over time, the U.S. government slowly lost or ceded control of the ability to influence each of those three variables. Today, it can manipulate none of them. Compared with World War II, the amount of information that an interested citizen can access to learn about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is staggering. Newspapers, books, blogs, movies, documentaries, radio, Web sites, streaming videos, podcasts, and television shows combine to create an environment in which any person can get more opinions, facts, and news-from-the-front stories in more languages than at any other time in history.
Depending on their political persuasion, almost all Americans import their news from different sources, particularly TV and the Internet. Conservatives watch FOX News and read Web sites like Free Republic and the Drudge Report. Liberals watch the BBC and read Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. And each live report is subject to instant scrutiny, as the New Republic recently learned the hard way by having to retract Private Scott Beauchamp's unverifiable stories from Iraq.
Among military/government professionals, many watch C-SPAN and read Michael Yon and the Small Wars Journal, not to mention Proceedings. This audience often believes that if "good news" were reported more often, the U.S. citizenry would be more inclined to tolerate surges and other plans for victory. But public opinion, by and large, is already in the military's corner.
In polls, the U.S. military consistently ranks highest in the nation in public confidence—higher than the police, financial institutions, or the criminal justice system and, of course, the press.5 Consequently, articles about soccer balls being distributed, water being purified, or schools being built have little influence over a person's position on the war. Most Americans expect these things to happen; they want to see their uniformed emissaries as heroes. Stories about Marines giving gifts to smiling children—or even reports of Navy Cross or Medal of Honor recipients—have as much moral force as an epic tale of a New York police officer helping an elderly woman across the street.
And most stories from Afghanistan and Iraq, both good and bad, have been factually correct. Incidents of journalists writing falsehood as fact, or omitting a truth to slant a story, occur with far less frequency than the conventional military wisdom holds. For three years, The New York Times was pilloried by those in uniform for "not reporting the good news" from Iraq. But starting in spring 2007, positive reports from Ramadi began appearing on the Gray Lady's front pages.
Had John Burns, then-Baghdad bureau chief of the Times, suddenly become a loyal American reporter? Had he previously been trying to subvert the cause of victory? Not at all. The facts changed from bad to good, and they were reported accordingly. Blaming Burns and his colleagues for the war's rise or fall is like holding a sportscaster responsible for the outcome of the big game.
Warriors Fight and Reporters Report
The greatest blows for the media's ability to influence public opinion regarding the Iraq War have been inflicted, ironically, by the current administration. Declarations of weapons that went undiscovered, premature aerial theatrics declaring mission accomplishment, outright denials of the existence of a guerrilla war, and repeated statements that "the insurgency is in its last throes" meant that all frontline reports were more likely to be scrutinized with cynical circumspection by a public whose trust had been broken time and again. And, as many have observed, telling the people to go shopping hardly forged a fighting spirit.
For this reason, senior officers and their civilian Pentagon counterparts should at least distinguish between the political views of a newspaper's editorial pages and eyewitness accounts from the front lines. But blaming the press at all fails to draw a clear, fair line between the words pundit and correspondent. The former are paid and expected to deliver an opinion; the latter report events as they see them. Blaming either sets a bad tone with impressionable subordinates, who conclude that reporters are guilty until proven innocent. And many of the correspondents that America's warriors often scorn as disloyal have seen more of Iraq's horrors than the populations of Camp Victory, Camp Anaconda, and Al Asad Air Base combined.
Finally, American writers today are ill-equipped to craft political literature such as John Steinbeck's during World War II. Steinbeck could claim the moral high ground, but in the ideological struggles within both Islam and Iraq, advocates of an Islamic Renaissance such as Salman Rushdie, Shirin Ebadi, and Reza Aslan have infinitely stronger leverage over the hearts and minds of authentic freedom fighters abroad.
General Conway observed firsthand the power of local media in April 2004 during the first battle of Fallujah. Later he commented: "Al Jazeera kicked our butts."6 While this after-action report is true, it is also incomplete. It suggests that we have the ability to strike back, either officially through military-led information operations, or unofficially through the American press corps.
Both are impossible solutions: cultural gaps can only be bridged by regional reporters. As soon as Fallujah turned its soccer field into a cemetery, Al Jazeera was bound to "win" internationally no matter how yellow its journalism became. The first Fallujah campaign was a pig that no amount of literary lipstick could have made attractive. Even Ernie Pyle couldn't have rescued it.
In with the New—Objectively
For better or worse, we must accept that the old journalism era is long gone, one of many victims of the Vietnam era. Leaders cannot anticipate using reporters or their mediums as avenues for sustaining the public's morale in a long, complex conflict. Nor can we place responsibility for the moral level of war on the shoulders of American writers. Blaming the press may be emotionally satisfying for a frustrated corps of officers and politicians, but it is not a truthful, useful, or intelligent course of action.
Credit for recent successes in Iraq should rightfully go to the American and Iraqi leaders who joined forces against fundamentalist tyranny (particularly Sheik al Sattar of Ramadi, who was recently assassinated). The New York Times, which reported the success, deserves no special reward for doing so. But responsibility for the failures—or for the expressions and demands of a restless electorate—cannot be shunted onto cameras, laptops, or notepads, either.
Instead of seeing the press as friend or foe, or trying to "fight the media war," military leaders should view journalists like weather or illumination in operational planning. How an action might be reported to the local culture by civilian bystanders—and how it could influence the American body politic, who control the U.S. military through their elected representatives—should be a variable to consider, not a product to be spun. Commanders should focus their energies on the resources that they can influence, instead of railing against grim—and typically accurate—dispatches from reporters that they cannot.
1. Email received 14 July 2007, from a Marine who was my senior enlisted adviser when I commanded convoys in al Anbar.
2. U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondent's Association: Annual Awards Dinner, Tyson's Corner, Virginia, September 2006. Then—LtGen Conway had already been appointed the 34th Commandant.
3. Nicholaus Mills, "Ernie Pyle and War Reportage," Dissent Magazine, fall 2005.
4. From the introduction by Donald V. Coers in the reprinted edition of The Moon Is Down (Penguin: 1995). Coers says that when the book was published, it was attacked by literary giants Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber, creating "the fiercest literary battle of the Second World War." Thurber and others believed that by depicting the Nazis as misguided humans instead of monsters, Steinbeck would further demoralize the victims. But the widespread distribution of his work vindicated both Steinbeck's literary sense and his knowledge of his target audience.
5. In a June 2007 Gallup Poll, 69 percent of Americans had either "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the military. This was the highest level of confidence in the nation in any major institution. Local police, 54 percent; banks, 41 percent; criminal justice, 19 percent. Congress achieved just 14 percent. Archived at www.gallup.com.
6. Bing West, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle of Fallujah (New York: Bantam, 2005), p. 338.