White House Reveals ‘Boots on Ground’ in Syria, but Media Too
Giddy Over Special Ops Porn to Notice
By Adam Johnson
May 20, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "FAIR"
- The White House announced on Saturday that a team of Delta Force
soldiers had gone into sovereign Syrian territory to kill an alleged ISIS
“commander” and a few dozen other faceless bad guys.
Per usual, the media would retell the narrative based entirely on Pentagon and
White House action movie prose. Just as with the bin Laden raid narrative—that
later turned out to be
mostly false—this tale involved some unbelievably compelling details:
“rescuing a Yazidi slave,” “hand-to-hand combat,” “women and children as human
shields,” “precise fire” (that, of course, avoided these women and children),
and a body count, “40 extremists,” that would make Jack Bauer blush.
To the New York Times‘ credit, it did
issue one of the most passive-aggressive “we could not independently verify
these claims” disclaimers in journalistic history:
A Defense Department official said Islamic State fighters
who defended their building and Abu Sayyaf tried to use women and children
as shields, but that the Delta Force commandos “used very precise fire” and
“separated the women and children.” The official said the operation involved
close “hand-to-hand fighting.” (The accounts of the raid came from
military and government officials and could not be immediately verified
through independent sources.)
No, of course they couldn’t!
Obviously, this is one of the limits of reporting on secret
events in far-off, opaque war zones. Nonetheless, given that the last such
politically loaded raid, on the bin Laden “compound” in Pakistan, turned out to
be full of White House lies—to say nothing of Seymour Hersh’s recent,
high-profile allegations that the
entire thing was staged—you’d think a bit of skepticism would be in order.
But, in a world of mass information asymmetry, the government’s word on these
matters is treated as the authoritative one until proven otherwise.
This routine problem, however, is not the real journalistic
crime here. The real issue is that the White House just admitted it has American
ground troops engaged in combat missions in Syria—and no one seemed to notice,
much less care.
While it’s true the White House
has acknowledged hostage rescue missions in Syria, this is the first
time it’s admitted soldiers have been deployed inside Syria for expressly
military purposes. As one Defense Department official would explain to the
Washington Post:
The raid was only the second time US Special Operations
forces are known to have operated on the ground in Syria, and the first
“direct action” mission by US forces there. Special operators conducted
an unsuccessful mission last summer to rescue American hostages being held
by the militants, who later executed them.
Isn’t this important? Isn’t it significant that what began 292
days ago as a “limited,”
“humanitarian”
mission in Iraq has now expanded (again) to include US ground troops—albeit in a
measured capacity—in Syria? Many observers certainly thought so:
But almost every media outlet was too fascinated recapping the
DoD’s superficial action narrative to ask why, or if, the US should have
soldiers fighting in yet another country. Instead we got Pentagon-curated
military-speak, that patented combination of sterilized violence, action prose
and technology show-off, as with
CNN‘s “Delta Force entered the target area on Black Hawk
helicopters and V-22 aircraft, a US official familiar with the operation said.”
Or the Washington Post‘s similarly breathless
account (5/16/15),
reading like the synopsis of a Hollywood thriller:
Delta Force troops, flying from Iraq aboard Black Hawk
helicopters and V-22 Ospreys, encountered almost immediate fire from
militant forces when they touched down….
In what a US Defense official described as “close-quarters
combat” against militants using women and children as human shields, about a
dozen militants were killed.
The key fact of the raid’s broader geopolitical significance
is either glossed over or ignored altogether.
This war, just like the
US operation in Libya, has been marked by mission creep. The White House
promises the objectives are X. Then they’re X, but also Y. Then X, Y and
introducing Z, which is couched in special forces porn so it largely goes
unnoticed.
What the media rarely do is stop to put things in context.
It’s the slow drip of a war that’s sold to an American public in small,
disconnected parts, so we don’t notice.
Put another way: If we were told in August 2014 that within a
year, the US would have ground troops carrying out raids in Syria and Iraq, as
well as bombing in both countries, would we have agreed? Impossible to know, but
with the media framing these qualitative leaps in scope as routine (but at the
same time sexed-up) military operations, the bait-and-switch routine goes almost
entirely unnoted.
As I’ve pointed out previously,
only 40 percent of Americans read past the headline, so when everyone from
CNN to New York Times to
Vox announces it as a military raid to catch a “key ISIS commander,”
and puts the fact that it’s the first direct military action in Syria by US
troops—if they do at all—in paragraph 12, most people will never notice the
expansion in US military objectives.
Frame it however you like, but the US just announced it has
active combat troops on the ground in Syria. Even if one thinks this is A-OK,
shouldn’t media outlets make that the primary topic of at least one article?