March 21, 2006

UPDATE

I just talked to my Swedish friend, and somehow something came up about a unit leaving for Iraq. She asked if we were still sending soldiers to Iraq, you know, since the bombing started this week.

Oh lord.

When I flipped out about the media's misrepresentation of the air assault, I honestly didn't even think about the repercussions for the global media. I didn't stop to think that the German media might be telling Germans that the US started bombing. What a mess they've caused.

Posted by Sarah at March 21, 2006 03:24 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Gotta sell newspapers though, right? From the BBC:

"By the middle of Day Two, the operation had already been scaled down to 900 men.

US military pictures showed troops involved in the operation
Operation Swarmer clearly bore no comparison in scale to the initial attack which brought down Saddam Hussein's regime, or to the massive assault on the insurgent stronghold in the city of Falluja in November 2004.

Nor did it appear to match a series of counter-insurgency operations involving air strikes and ground forces in remote areas near the Syrian border in western Iraq last year.

In one four-day campaign last May, the US military said it had killed 125 insurgents for the loss of nine of its own men killed and 40 injured.

So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world?

The use of the phrase "the largest air assault operation" was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign."

Posted by: Will Somerset at March 22, 2006 02:02 AM

Exactly. My husband called it in the first 30 seconds. When we saw that first news report, he said two things: 1) it's an assault, not a strike, and 2) it's just a bunch of bravado so that someone can say he led the biggest air assault. Hubby wasn't far off the mark.

Posted by: Sarah at March 22, 2006 06:52 AM