The blogs of war: how the Internet is reshaping foreign policy

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

THE WAR in Iraq was the first Internet war: the first major conflict in which the Internet crossed theater lines and affected the course of events. This was unexpected. In the pre-Internet era, many commentators seemed to believe that rapid communication might make war impossible, or at least very difficult. How could people stir up the necessary hatred for the enemy if they were in constant communication with the enemy? How could you dehumanize people you actually knew?

This view, alas, was proved naive when the 19 hijackers of September 11--who had lived in America long enough to know their victims quite well--found themselves entirely capable of launching a brutal attack on innocent civilians. Another prewar view of the impact of broader communications technology proved more accurate, but still short of the overall picture. I and many others believed that one of the most important effects of new communications technology would be to undermine government control of information. As I wrote back in 1989:

   As information processing tools ... become
   more and more widespread ... the ability of
   governments to limit their ... use without
   bearing fearsome economic costs will be much
   less. Still more dramatic in its impact will be
   the spread (already imminent) of compact and
   inexpensive satellite up- and downlink equipment,
   which will make events in even the most
   remote regions fodder for worldwide television
   regardless of the efforts of governments
   to ensure otherwise.... While the spread of
   communications technologies and the accompanying
   growth in the ability of people to
   communicate despite the disapproval of their
   governments will not in themselves prevent
   tyranny and abuses of human rights, they will
   make both more difficult. (1)

These were words fit for the September 10 era, for they contain a key embedded assumption that has been proven largely wrong in the post-9/11 wars: that the main role of new communications technologies would be to bypass governmental information gatekeepers. In fact, the primary role of those new technologies has been to bypass professional news media organizations, and to undermine their role as gatekeepers. Furthermore, although the upshot of this has been, as predicted, to bring increased accountability to tyrants, it has not, as some might have thought, made war more difficult. In fact, by undermining the power of professional media organizations to present a negative image of war and to ignore dictators' crimes, the new technology has made war against tyrants easier.

Covering the Coverage

BECAUSE OF America's overwhelming military superiority, military analysts generally believe that the chief constraint to U.S. warfighting capabilities is found in domestic public opinion. U.S. forces may be difficult to defeat on the battlefield, but Americans are more likely to give up on a war as a piece of bad business, and to respond swiftly to bad news stories--news stories produced in quantity by news media organizations that are generally anti-war in slant and that tend to hype bad news on all subjects in an effort to secure an audience.

Indeed, this is the traditional story of Vietnam, as told by analysts in the military: although the Tet offensive was a military failure for the North Vietnamese, it was a public relations success that turned American opinion against the war and made an American withdrawal simply a matter of time. This allowed the United States to be out-waited by the North Vietnamese regime, which--thanks to its totalitarian secret police and complete press censorship advantages--was not similarly constrained by popular sentiment. Later incidents involving the Marines in Beirut, and Rangers and Delta Force in Somalia, seemed to support this theory.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq appear, however, to undercut this view. For although media and pundits took the usual negative view of hostilities (Afghanistan was famously pronounced a "quagmire" by journalist Nicholas von Hoffman on the very day Mazar-e Sharif fell and the Taliban collapse began), the Internet allowed other Americans to demonstrate support for the war. The result was a very different climate. (2)

The most famous example is the "warblog"--a weblog that focuses largely on the post-9/11 wars, and the political and diplomatic circumstances surrounding them. Some of these became quite famous and developed readerships in the hundreds of thousands, comparing favorably with political opinion magazines like the New Republic, the Nation and National Review. Even some of the lesser known weblogs developed considerable followings, and some of their writers wound up attracting readers from the world of Big Media, and even crossing over to write for such publications. (Blogger Steven Den Beste, for example, who frequently writes long strategic analyses of the war, wound up writing for the Wall Street Journal.)

"Fact checking" journalistic reports was a major aspect of the warblogs' work, and the results were occasionally startling. Correspondent Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker reported from Baghdad that the American bombing campaign had left "a landscape of death and wanton devastation, all stamped 'Made in America.'" (3) Warbloggers immediately noted that commercial satellite images of Baghdad, released by the private company SpaceImaging that same day, showed no such devastation, with the city remaining largely intact and traffic moving normally through the streets. This correction received a good deal of attention nationwide, and bloggers also noted on-the-ground reports from a blogger in Baghdad (the pseudonymous Salam Pax, now a columnist for the Guardian in London) that damage was less than Western media were claiming--and noting that Saddam's men had been filling trenches with oil and igniting them for several days.