I read an article in the New York Times (online, of course — I wouldn’t pay for that rag) about the insurgency in Iraq that was quite interesting. Then I read Power Line, and they had a different perspective on the issue.
I don’t think either analysis is entirely correct, although there may be a great deal of truth to both. Rather, I suspect that the insurgency is both ill-informed (being willing to die for something that seems to be failing requires a lack of faith in evidence to the contrary) and interested in making waves in the easiest way possible. If they are following Bin Laden’s analysis that America is a paper tiger and will run at the first sight of blood (an analysis that was borne out repeatedly for many years), they are likely relying on the media in America to exaggerate the death and destruction in Iraq to turn public opinion against it, and withdraw the troops.
This makes a great deal of sense, actually. Using the media as a force-multiplier, it wouldn’t be necessary to have a uniting ideology. In fact, one could just get in the way of being blindly supported by elements in American society in their desire to force troops out and embarrass the Bush administration, as such goals would likely violate liberal sensibilites and American and western values as a whole. It isn’t even necessary to go to the trouble of killing the more difficult targets of American soldiers, as any indiscriminate slaughter is amply covered in the media, and with much the same result.
Maybe the reason the insurgency is such a mystery to the media is that they are at once targets and participants in it.