MISREPORTING WAR

The media bias in reporting on the war on terror continues. To read and hear the MSM, one would think that we are getting our asses kicked. Do not think for a moment that those we fight are not media savvy. They follow every thing the media has toprint or say and quite frankly, they are loving it. The media's responsibility is supposed to be informing the public, but they are only presenting the negatives, not any of the positives. Of course, they do all have political agendas. Ralph Peters has much to say on this in his column.

"Yes, Afghanistan has problems. It will have problems beyond our lifetimes. But the country is vastly more peaceful, humane and hopeful than ever before in its history.

The disparate regions composing Afghanistan have always been lawless beyond the city limits. Tribes, not governments, ruled. The current blips of back-country violence are nothing compared to the country's gruesome past. This is a horribly wounded society that's healing faster than we had any right to expect.

Sit back and press the memory button. Remember how, in the wake of 9/11, the experts warned that we'd suffer devastating casualties when our "soft" troops came up against the "battle-hardened" Taliban? We were assured our efforts would fail, that we'd wind up as badly burned as the Soviets and Brits before us; the entire country would take up arms against any foreign invaders.

Didn't happen. Our military and the CIA delivered a swift, stunning triumph. And our troops are actually welcome.


No one held those errant experts accountable. Now they're back, pouncing on every scrap of bad news in the hope they'll be able to say, "We told you so.""

The fact ofthe matter is we beat the Taliban like rented mules. For all their whining and rantings, thes so called experts the media trots out were wrong. Yet, the media keeps trotting them out and they are never held accountable. To bad that some are fooled by these self aggrandizing fools. The media trots themout, becuase it would seem the "experts" agree with the media's world view.

"And here's how our media deal with the undeniable progress made in Afghanistan:

Tens of thousands of girls enrolled in schools? Who cares. Peace in most of the country? Boring.

Democratic elections? Non-story. Economic progress? Less than a non-story.

A construction boom in Kabul? About time journalists had a nice hotel. Afghan troops defending their elected government? Zero interest, dude.

Sixteen GIs lost in a helicopter shot down by terrorists? Now THAT'S news.

It is news, of course. We mourn the loss of every one of our service members. And while every American casualty, colonel or corporal, counts equally, the loss of a team of Navy Seals is an operational blow. We want to know what happened.

The problem is the imbalance in the reporting. My friends who serve or served in Afghanistan are bewildered by the only-bad-news-counts coverage. By any objective measure, Afghanistan's an incredible, they-said-it-couldn't-be-done success story. But we only hear that the Taliban is back.

Well, the Taliban never went away entirely. The movement may never fully disappear — no more than nutty white-supremacy groups will vanish completely from the U.S. scene. But we're better off now than in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Taliban's been reduced to a local nuisance."

I have heard this frommany I know that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. When they hear and see how the media is reporting the events there, they shake their heads and wonder why none of the positives are being reported. Many of them feell the media is rooting for a terrorist win.

"We can't expect perfect solutions to the world's problems. The current skirmishing in Afghanistan involves classic frontier-bandido clashes, reminiscent of our own past. Apache raiders would strike in our southwest, then flee across the border to Mexico — just as the Taliban flees into Pakistan.

The Apaches remained a local problem for decades, but they never threatened our government's survival. And the Taliban won't return to rule in Kabul.

But the Taliban have an ally the Apaches never dreamed of — the media. Make no mistake: Our Islamist enemies are as media-savvy as the top Hollywood agents. They know they can't defeat us militarily, so attacks aim to influence opinion polls and decision-makers in the United States. Calls for withdrawal timetables and partisan declarations that we're failing only encourage our enemies to kill more of our troops.

This week, we lost 16 fine Americans in the Afghan mountains. They deserve to be mourned, and their sacrifice merits respect. But the failure to provide balanced reporting from Afghanistan — and Iraq — is nothing less than spitting on their graves."

The media and the dem/leftists, for that matter, seem quite ignorant of our own history. It tooks several years before our Constitution was hammered out, yet they expect the Iraqis to hammer one out in months. Just see what John Kerry had to say about establishing a deadline for the Iraqis to have a constitution in place. The Apaches were a rather good fighting force and made their rais into the US and then went back to Mexico, where they could not be persued. Sound like a famliar tactic? The media plays right into the hand of these terrorist scum. The dem/leftists do as well. It is high time the dem/leftists put up their plan or shut up. As for the media, they continue to lose readers and viewers and wonder why. - Sailor