# Posted 11:59 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HACKNEYED STEREOTYPICAL CLICHES: We talk a lot about the media and its biases. We compile evidence and publish indignant criticism. But we don't often ask whether all of this one-sided coverage actually has an impact on its audience. After all, it stands to reason that if we know better than to believe what we read, so does everyone else.

In my academic work, I've come across a fair amount of literature that covers the influence of mainstream media on public opinion. Its conclusions support both sides of the argument. On the one hand, most individuals are fairly resistant to new information that calls into question their established beliefs. If presented with both sides of an argument, most individuals can evaluate their relative merits.

But if presented with only one side of an argument, we are surprisingly susceptible to persuasion. What no one seems to know is exactly how one-sided a source of information has to be in order to become persuasive. By the same token, no one seems to know at point the one-sidedness of an argument becomes so self-evident that it proovkes suspicions of bias.

Naturally, I don't have any answers to these questions. (Although I will recommend my favorite book on the subject, whose title is "Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology".)

So, then, where is this post heading? I'm not sure. My original intent was to comment on the less-than-subtle anti-military prejudice which runs throughout one of the major articles in this week's NYT Magazine. It really p****d me off.

On the other hand, I am beginning to wonder whether such constant criticism of the New York Times serves much of a purpose. If we all know to read the Times critically, what exactly is the point of saying so again and again? That's why I began this post with my comments about assessing the impact of the media rather than just its contents.

But you know what? NYT bashing can be fun. After all, if we don't vent, we'll explode. And maybe one day our backlash against the Times will force it to either raise its standards or to admit that the Washington Post has now become the United States' paper of record. But for the moment, let's talk about 'Good Kills' by Peter Maass.

The table of contents warns us that

To get to Baghdad, the marines of the Third Battalion fought the old-fashioned way — by shooting as many of the enemy as they could. Their victims weren't all soldiers.

So, is this another My Lai? Has the United States lost its moral compass? Let's find out.

Up front, we find out that

The Third Battalion had a consistent strategy as it moved toward Baghdad: kill every fighter who refused to surrender.

Oh, that Third Battalion. Coming up with new and brutal strategies that might offend the sensitivies of ignorant America. Where did this whole idea of killing the enemy come from? Why didn't we learn anything from the Native Americans, who believed that the greatest act of courage in battle is to touch one's enemy without hurting him? Surely that would have brought down the Ba'athist dictatorship as fast as an actual military strike.

Or at least wound the enemy instead of killing him. Aim for the arms and legs. Sure, it might have taken a little longer to get to Baghdad, but think of the moral triumph it would have represnted. Instead of telling us that the invasion had stalled in its second week because of fierce Iraqi resistance, the media should have reminded us of how ineffective the mighty Repubican Guards actually are. Then we could've gone easy on them instead of pursuing this nonsensical strategy of killing them instead.

Moving on, we find out that

The unit's commander, Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, had a calm bearing that never seemed to waver as he and his troops made their way through Iraq...

When I spoke to him on the southern side of the Diyala bridge soon after the battalion arrived there on the morning of April 6, he was in a serene mood. ''Things are going well,'' he said. ''Really well.''

When Colonel McCoy told you that things were going well, it meant his marines were killing Iraqi fighters.

Now I get it. It is the brutal Col. McCoy who has brainwashed his soldiers into thinking that war involves death. If McCoy had any conscience at all, he never would have said that things were going well. Intead, he would've delivered an agonizing and self-critical appraisal of his personal responsibility for the devastation of Iraqi society.

Later on,

[McCoy] was sitting in the front seat of his Humvee, with an encrypted radio phone to his left ear. He had the sort of done-it-again pride in his voice that you hear from a business executive who is kicking back at the clubhouse as he tells you he beat par again.

You see, what's really disgusting about McCoy is not that he's a killer, but that he is so non-chalant about it. But is it really his fault, or is McCoy's depravity just the byproduct of a capitalist order that fails to differentiate between the ethics of business and the ethics of war?

In the heat of battle, McCoy radio's his commander in order to inform him that

''We're killing them like it's going out of style. They keep reinforcing, these Republican Guards, and we're killing them as they show up. We're running out of ammo.''

Oh my God! A direct quote! Surely this is incontrovertible evidnece of McCoy's brutality. In theory, one might say that McCoy's words are a sort of black humor, a desperate attempt to mask his own fear of dying in a hail of Iraqi bullets. Or worse, a hail of friendly fire. No, no, that is way too far-fetched. McCoy is a killer.

For McCoy

This war was not about hearts and minds or even liberation. Those are amorphous concepts, not rock-hard missions. For Colonel McCoy and the other officers who inflicted heavy casualties on Iraqis and suffered few of their own, this war was about one thing: killing anyone who wished to take up a weapon in defense of Saddam Hussein's regime, even if they were running away.

Though a killer he may be, McCoy is no fool. He sees right through all of the politicians' talk about hearts and minds and liberation. How could violence have anything to do with freedom? As M. Chirac has so often reminded us, war never solves anything.

In an attempt to educate his military hosts about the perils of war, the author of this trenchant essay

suggested to Colonel McCoy one morning that Iraqi civilians might not appreciate the manner in which his marines tended to say hello to the locals with the barrels of their guns raised...

[But] ''They don't have to like us,'' he said. ''Liking has nothing to do with it. You'll never make them like you. I can't make them like me. All we can do is make them respect us and then make sure that they know we're here on their behalf. Making them like us -- Yanks always want to be liked, but it doesn't always work out that way.''

Just like George Bush and the French. If only McCoy had tried to be nice, surely things would've have turned out differently.

Perhaps the greatest moral dilemma facing McCoy and his troops was how to deal with the threat of suicide bombers. How does one tell if an approaching vehicle contains fanatical militia or just desperate civilians who won't stop for warning shots or anything else? After the battle, McCoy's soldiers discovered that innocent men and women had been killed along with the armed militiamen. Lest the Marines fail to recognize the tragic nature of the situation

A journalist came up and said the civilians should not have been shot. There was a silence, and after the journalist walked away, a third marine, Lance Cpl. Santiago Ventura, began talking, angrily.

''How can you tell who's who?'' said Corporal Ventura. He spoke sharply, as though trying to contain his fury. ''You get a soldier in a car with an AK-47 and civilians in the next car. How can you tell? You can't tell.''

Of course, it is always the journalists who have the last word. As the author informs us,

When I visited the kill box down the road from Diyala bridge the morning after the battle, I noticed that the destroyed cars were several hundred yards from the marine positions that fired on them. The marines could have waited a bit longer before firing, and if they had, perhaps the cars would have stopped, or perhaps the marines would have figured out that the cars contained confused civilians. The sniper [from the Third Battalion] knew this. He knew that something tragic had happened at the bridge. And so, as we spoke in Baghdad, he stopped defending the marines' actions and started talking about their intent. He and his fellow marines, he said, had not come to Iraq to drill bullets into women and old men who were just trying to find a safe place.

Finally, the confession. Confronted by the New York Times, even the most hardened soldier cannot fail to recognize that he is a war criminal. Just like Vietnam. We sent American boys overseas to become merciless killers. But there's more:

Collateral damage is far easier to bear for those who are responsible for it from afar -- from the cockpit of a B-1 bomber, from the command center of a Navy destroyer, from the rear positions of artillery crews. These warriors do not see the faces of the mothers and fathers they have killed. They do not see the blood and hear the screams and live with those memories for the rest of their lives. The grunts suffer this. The Third Battalion accomplished its mission of bringing military calamity upon the regime of Saddam Hussein; the statue of Saddam fell just a few minutes after the sniper and I spoke. But the sniper, and many other marines of the Third Battalion, could not feel as joyous as the officers in the rear, the generals in Qatar and the politicians in Washington.

As we all know, bomber pilots, naval officers and artillery crews are far too ignorant to recognize that their actions may result in the death of innocent civilians. Just like innocent civilians in the United States, they remain blissfully unaware about the true nature of war.

But let's not forget the generals in Qatar and the politicians in Washington. They should know better. How dare they be joyous? What they should have done is obvious. They should never have started this war. Then they would have had a right to rejoice.

They could have basked in the praise of the New York Times editorial board while Saddam Hussein went about his business, stockpiling chemical weapons and murdering those who resisted his tyrannical rule. That is the true nature of peace.
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