Libya: The media-driven war

Now that widespread resistance has broken out in Syria, having festered on a small scale for a handful of weeks, will President Obama and Europe turn their attention toward protecting the lives of Syrian civilians who are being killed as they demonstrate against Bashar al-Assad's dictatorial rule?

Military troops opened fire during protests in the southern part of Syria on Friday and killed peaceful demonstrators, according to witnesses and news reports, hurtling the strategically important nation along the same trajectory that has altered the landscape of power across the Arab world. ...

Human rights groups said that since protests began seven days ago in the south, 38 people had been killed by government forces — and it appeared that many more were killed on Friday. Precise details were hard to obtain because the government sealed off the area to reporters and would not let foreign news media into the country. ...

Human rights groups said that since protests began seven days ago in the south, 38 people had been killed by government forces — and it appeared that many more were killed on Friday. Precise details were hard to obtain because the government sealed off the area to reporters and would not let foreign news media into the country.

Note that last sentence: the government "would not let foreign news media into the country." This is the key point to understanding the fury the West has unleashed against Libya compared to the yawn we are not even stifling concerning Syria.

The campaign in Libya was almost entirely media driven from the outset.

I do not mean by that the the media actually promoted the war against Qaddafi or that media outlets or reporters encouraged Western intervention. I mean that Qaddafi's major strategic blunder was allowing foreign media to cover the resistance from its beginning practically without hindrance, even including broadcasting from Tripoli literally while the initial Allied cruise missiles were landing.

The images and video coming from Libya, especially during the early days of the street demonstrations showing protesters being gunned down, were the sine qua non of Western intervention. Not all the images and video came through the media, of course, as much of it was sent out by the resistance itself, having been captured on smart phones and personal cameras. But the European and American commercial media used those images extensively and that coverage was key to the growing dismay and revulsion in Europe and the US.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implicitly admitted that the media played a key role in energizing military intervention.

"I know that the nightly news cannot cover a humanitarian crisis that thankfully did not happen, but it is important to remember that many, many Libyans are safer today because the international community took action," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday.

Assad, on the other hand, is not the fool that Qaddafi proved to be. Assad's father, Hafez, slaughtered 20,000 people in in 1982 in the city of Hama for resisting his rule. Absolutely no foreign coverage was done because no reporters were there - and for sure Assad didn't send out a press release afterward. Bashar has obviously learned this lesson well.The corpses will mount in Syria quite out sight from the never-blinking eye of the international media. And the Western governments will therefore be able to to pretend they don't know.

Photo source, DailyMail.co.uk