Richard Miniter Jousts at Media Myths
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Every war is accompanied by its own mythos. Our own American Revolution, to this day, totes around the baggage of the "embattled farmer" and Mel Gibson at the expense of the Continental line and exertions of Steuben, Pulaski, Lafayette, deKalb, and Kosciusko. By the War of 1812, the militia myth was so deeply ingrained in the national consciousness that we nearly lost our new won independence.
Some myths arise through spontaneous generation as reflective of how a culture views itself and others are deliberately created. While the British Army was getting smacked about in Belgium in 1914, British intelligence was busily creating the myth of the implacable Hun who amused himself by raping nuns and tossing babies onto his bayonet.
Read on.
Other myths arise through cultural blinders. Newspaper reports on the Second Sino-Japanese War portrayed the Japanese army as poorly trained, its aircraft as second rate, and its pilots as barely able to fly. As Martin Caidin relates in Zero!, Commomwealth pilots flying the F2A Brewster Buffalo from Singapore spent their time, according to one British pilot, "inventing new ways of drinking gin and tonic" until confronting reality in December 1941.
Regardless of provenance, few myths are harmless and Richard Miniter takes aim at some of the modern ones surrounding the GWOT in Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror.
Some of the mythology chosen by Miniter reads like a brutal fisking of a typical New York Times article on bin Laden or the GWOT:
- Bin Laden was funded by the CIA.
- Bin Laden has access to a huge private fortune.
- Poverty is a root cause of terrorism.
Still others are a cornucopia of MoveOn.org talking points:
- Halliburton is making a fortune in Iraq.
- 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq.
- Wolfowitz said that Iraq's oil would pay for reconstruction.
- There were warnings about 9-11.
- There is no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda
Some merit consideration by those of us on the right:
- Racial profiling of airline passengers would work.
- The Mexican border is the most likely route for terrorists into the US.
The myths Miniter deconstructs have a debilitating effect on any discussion of the GWOT because they change the very character of the war, obscure the genesis of the war, and of nature of the enemy; they maximize the threat represented and minimize our ability to confront that enemy.
Even as we watch with slackjawed amazement today, a similar mythology is being created around the Iraq War, with myths that were contemporaneously exposed as fraudulent being recycled as facts, so in addition to performing a public service, Miniter seems to have achieved job security in the process.
Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror
By Richard Miniter
Regnery Publishing, 256 pp.
Some myths are more dangerous than others.
Although, based on the publisher and the author's previous works, this would appear to be not be terribly objective I do enjoy these types of books because they at least try to look at the reality and not the overt talking point.
Thanks for bringing it up.