When we watch TV reporting by the MSM (the 527 Media in Jed Babbin’s apt phrase), we don’t listen to what they say. We note rather the time devoted to the car bombings, the murders, the assassinations, etc, and the visual images. Man is a visual animal; seeing informs our other senses. Often more important than the blah-blah is the daily repetition of the images and the pictures of chaos and slaughter.

Over and over these media images repeat the same theme (despite the politically correct voice-overs): Arabs and Muslims are insane. The Shiites and Sunnis hate each other and slaughter each other mindlessly over nothing at all, especially during a “holy” month, or if they can blow up a “holy” site, and they have apparently been doing so for hundreds of years. They won’t stop and they refuse to live like normal human beings. They bomb this and they bomb that, again and again and again. The only people who live anything like normal lives are the ones who are ruled with an iron fist in some other awful country.

And then the camera pans back to the marketplace full of people where the bomb went off and there is a mother wailing and carrying her broken son, and the media image is: there are millions of perfectly nice Arabs and Muslims who shop and vote and love their children — but they never amount to much. Wherever there is some imam with fire in his belly and jihad on his mind, the welfare of the regular people ceases to matter and they have no power.

These images — with a contradictory story line — have been fed to America for years now. The images are indelible; the story line less so. In our view, Afghanistan and Iraq were necessary campaigns in this long war on their military and strategic merits alone. But they have accomplished something else that is likely to be even more important in coming years. Ambrose Bierce is credited with saying that war is God’s way of teching Americans geography. Afghanistan and particularly Iraq have taught America the Arab and Muslim world, in powerful pictures. Iraq is likely to be the twilight moment of klinder and gentler warfare, and it has, in absolutely critical ways, provided the context for America to understand the much larger war that lies ahead.

That is not the message the MSM wanted to send, but they sent it just the same. Americans understand more today about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon and all the rest (the MME) than they ever thought they would or wanted to five years ago. And next time, there won’t likely be concern about a “Democratic Middle East” if the flare once again goes up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 8:38 am and is filed under art, culture, business, General, Iran, Left of Left, MSM, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.