Wednesday, 26 March 2003

Information overload. As I mentioned earlier, I'm on sabbatical this month—Australian labor law thoughtfully mandates a month's paid leave for every five years with a company, and I transferred in with twelve years under my belt, so I've given myself a nice long six-week holiday. As it happened, my vacation began the day Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to leave Iraq, so I've been able to give the war my complete and undivided attention: For seven straight days now, I have read the entire Internet. I have absorbed every piece of information that has been blogged about the war, watched every news channel in existence, and this has been my entire exposure to the war (well, except for the protest march in downtown Sydney that made me late for dinner with my parents).

On that basis, I feel uniquely qualified to talk about warblogging, information overload, and the perception of war vs. the reality. Here's what I've observed so far:

• American military vehicles have a two-speed throttle. They are either "racing toward Baghdad" (moving) or "bogged down" (not moving); they have no other settings. "Bogged down" is a military term that includes stopping to fire, stopping for the night, stopping for inclement weather, stopping to secure a bridge, or anything else short of charging into a minefield at flank speed.
• Coalition forces endanger the lives of innocent civilians. By contrast, Iraqi troops do not endanger civilians by: Dressing as civilians, using civilians as human shields, operating out of civilian hospitals, putting artillery in civilian areas, or firing mortars at civilians. Nope. No endangering of civilians here. Move along. Hey, the Americans dropped a bomb on a bridge, er, I mean, on a bus filled with innocent doe-eyed school children and bunny rabbits! What barbarians.
• We should only fight on odd-numbered days. According to television reports, the war was going extremely well on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Tuesday, and was becoming a quagmire on Thursday, Saturday, Monday and today. We should adjust our strategy and fight on the good days.
• The Iraqi government can avoid violating the Geneva Convention simply by announcing they aren't violating it. Execution-style slaying of captured POWs is acceptable, as long as you publicly declare afterwards that you're treating (surviving?) prisoners according to the terms of the Geneva Convention. This is apparently the same logic that led people to believe that Saddam had disarmed in response to Resolution 1441—because, hey, he announced he had disarmed.
• The Iraqis have downed 74 Apache helicopters, the Americans have found 37 chemical weapons factories, and the British have encircled Basra 37 times. I've learned this by reading each warblog and news report separately, which gives me a clearer overall perspective. I'm not completely sure, but I may be reading about the same event more than once.
• Television analysts are much better at war planning than those idiots at the Pentagon. Having recklessly raced almost all the way to Baghdad in less than a week, American supply lines are way too long at this stage; the troops should have stopped at the halfway mark and, I dunno, planted beans or something, so they'd have more supplies for later.
• Turkey is on our side. No, wait, they're not. They're putting troops into Iraq. No, wait, they already had troops in Iraq, and they're just reinforcing them. No, wait, they're not moving any troops at all. No, wait, they're seizing Iraqi oilfields. No, wait, they're clashing with the Kurds. No, wait... darn it, could someone please embed a reporter on the Iraq side of the Iraq-Turkey border? I'm getting a headache here.
• The war is taking longer than expected. The television journalists had all expected to see American armor in Baghdad suburbs by the end of day five, and were heartily disappointed at Tommy Franks's lack of progress. (How this fits with the critique of overextended supply lines, I don't know yet; I'm sure there must be a logical explanation, though.)
• France has its own doctrine of pre-emption. They're pre-vetoing American U.N. resolutions on the administration of post-war Iraq, unless they involve bringing back Saddam and giving him one more last chance. Normally I'd write a French joke in this space, but I don't want to compete with Chirac.

More seriously, relying on weblogs for war news is like watching Rashomon over and over. No, it's like watching five different remakes of Rashomon, all looping simultaneously at slightly different film speeds. Getting your news this way is simultaneously better and worse than relying on one or two old-media sources: Better because it's easier to detect and correct bias, but worse because it takes so much more effort—and there's always that sweet, siren temptation to shut off your brain and cherry-pick the sources that reinforce your own biases. Blogs, and the "new media" in general, enrich the national conversation and threaten to splinter it into factions; it's a double-edged sword for the well-informed citizen.

Nonetheless, once you filter out all the biases, the military war is going about as well as could be expected (at least, for the coalition): Saddam's strategy appears to have been to create humanitarian disasters and blame them on the coalition, throwing as many civilians in harm's way as possible in the hopes of eroding popular support for the war—but the allied forces haven't taken the bait, the "embedded" reporters are generally making it clear who's responsible for what, and the people of America, Britain and Australia are, according to the opinion polls, closing ranks in support of the war. It's not over yet, and at some point Saddam may abandon this strategy and start lobbing nerve gas at the incoming troops, but in the end this won't save him.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:30 am. comments.