Stardate 20030330.1553

(Captain's log): Every four years the US holds an election for the Presidency. All of the parties nominate candidates, though as a practical matter on the Republicans and Democrats truly matter. And as a practical matter, the candidates are selected through an extended sequence of primary elections in various states.

Sometimes it isn't obvious when this process begins who the candidate will be for one party or the other. But often one candidate is so much stronger than all the others that it's almost a foregone conclusion that he's going to win the nomination.

Reporters will be attached to the various campaigns, and will travel with them to the various states along the way. And no reporter was ever rewarded for saying, "There's nothing to see here. Next?" Even in cases where there really isn't any kind of contest, reporters want it to seem as if there is. This only happens every four years, after all, and it has been known to be career-makers in journalism. Particularly for TV reporters on the campaign trail, they want to get a lot of air time, and that means they need to find something to talk about which is at least seems to be newsworthy.

So especially in the early primaries, there is a tendency to establish what amounts to a point spread for the candidates. In primary elections there is, of course, a formal definition of victory: whoever gets the most votes, wins. (In many cases, delegate assignment is proportional to vote count, but the principle is the same.) But the reporters will try to introduce a sort of higher-level standard based on whether a candidate actually does better or worse than expected.

This can be taken to ludicrous extremes, where just after a given primary you'll hear how the leader was dealt a "stunning blow" because he only got 65% of the vote instead of the expected 75%, and how his campaign "will be considering the impact in coming days" and "reevaluating their strategy" to try to "deal with this setback", while the second candidate's campaign "is encouraged by the surprisingly strong showing" because he got 25% instead of 20% and goes into the next stage "with new confidence". The reporters will try to treat this as some sort of indication that the second guy is in a position to somehow catch up with and beat the leader while the leader's campaign is actually in trouble. Indeed, they may go further than that and outright declare the second guy the victor in the contest, despite the fact that the first guy got more than twice as many votes.

That's why I stopped watching TV news a long time ago. If there is no story, they'll make one up.

Such come-from-behind candidacies have been known to happen, but most of the time this kind of reporter rhetoric is a crock. Eventually the fiction of victory based on beating the political point spread has to give way to the cold fact that the leader's total delegate count is rising faster than anyone else's. But for a while the reporters actually have something to report that seems to inspire suspense and keeps the viewers coming back to watch.

The same news organizations, and indeed many of the same reporters, are currently covering the war in Iraq, and I have noticed a similar tendency to ignore the absolute reality of what's happening in combat and instead for the news organizations to talk about the progress of the war in terms of how well the US campaign is living up to the (largely unrealistic) expectations that some (i.e. reporters) had for it. When things go really well but not as well as was thought, then it means that the US didn't beat the point spread, and it's reported as if it were a defeat.

The reality is much different. Take as a concrete example the fate of convoys and military columns moving around in Iraq. We successfully moved two entire divisions and a Cav regiment plus other units within striking range of Baghdad in only a few days, and there was only token resistance. There were casualties, but they were negligible, in the sense of actually representing a loss of combat power. (Obviously they weren't negligible in terms of the grief felt by the families of those who were lost.) For all practical purposes, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st MEF were able to go where they wanted, when they wanted, and the military forces of Iraq have not so far been able to do anything about it.

On the other hand, there have been several cases now where the Iraqis have tried to move significant formations to attack us, out of Basra or Baghdad. And what's happened in each such case was that we detected it and used air strikes and artillery to destroy it. Most if not all vehicles were gone and the majority of the men were either killed or wounded.

That's not a matter for jubilation, of course. But it's a fact that a man you kill today won't be there to fight you tomorrow; a tank destroyed today by a missile can't shoot at you tomorrow. One of the things you have to do in war is kill and destroy, and right now we've been extremely adept at doing so. Even when the Iraqis tried to move a column under cover of a major sandstorm, which they thought would cover their movement and protect them against air strikes, they found out that it didn't, and the column got butchered.

So on the absolute scale of "combat effects on moving columns" you have at one extreme us moving our columns 300 miles in five days, taking essentially no damage while doing so, and at the other extreme you have Iraq trying to move columns and losing them to our air power. Clearly we're doing a lot better than they are, on an absolute basis.

But that's not how the press is covering it. In part that's because many of the embedded reporters who have witnessed some of the small actions which have taken place have been awed by their first exposure to the reality of war, they have also over-interpreted the scale and significance of it. When they see a platoon of Marines engage in a small battle against a handful of Fedayeen, and see an American die and several get wounded, they talk about it as if it were "heavy resistance" and "a major battle" and so on. It's an example of misleading vividness combined with a total lack of understanding of just how big battles can actually be. What the reporter sees with his own eyes looms very large, especially when he doesn't really have anything to which to compare it for scale.

None of the reporters have been present in one of the Iraqi columns which caught the attention of our air power or artillery, in order to see what it's really like to be on the receiving end of "heavy resistance", or to witness the results of a true military catastrophe. (And lucky for them, too, because they'd be unlikely to be around to report the results afterward.)

But the reporters are also engaging in the same kind of phony handicapping that goes on in coverage of the primaries. Yeah, the Americans are moving their columns and only facing minor harassment, and the Iraqis are getting their columns destroyed, but the point is that the Americans were supposed to do even better than that. Irrespective of the absolute situation, they didn't beat the point spread. They didn't do as well as they should have.

Iraqi resistance is "surprisingly strong". American movement is "more difficult than anticipated". American casualties are "heavier than expected". The American command is "stunned by the resistance" and "reconsidering its strategy based on the setback". The military leaders of Iraq are "jubilant about their ability to resist". Victory in the campaign is "in doubt".

And all of that exists only in the minds of the reporters and those who are listening to them. It's all based on the creation of an artificial expectation for performance on each side rather than on a rational evaluation of the absolute results, and some sort of idea that the failure to achieve expectations presages some sort of absolute turnaround later, where the Iraqis might actually win a battle in absolute terms.

It could happen. Nothing in war is certain. But the smart money bets on the leader.

We hoped in this war it would be possible to cause wholesale surrender of major Iraqi units. That turned out to be less successful than some thought it might, although it may instead have encouraged wholesale desertion in many units, which would be less apparent to us now but no less significant militarily. It was worth a try, but the plan didn't require it. Since many of the remaining Iraqi units won't surrender or sit out the war, we're going to have to destroy them. That means that we're going to have to kill a lot of the men in those units, which means that all hope of a nearly-bloodless war are now gone. And it also means our units will be in combat, which means some of our people will die or be wounded.

We always knew there would be some units who would fight; it was a question more of how many and where. Now we pretty much know, and that's the next step. In fact, it's been going on for a couple of days already.

And it's important to keep in mind that as a result of this Iraq's conventional military power has been weakened and will continue to be weakened. Unless Syria directly intervenes (and the Syrian government would have to be idiotic to do so, and I don't expect them to), then there will be no significant troop reinforcements for Iraq. There has been a trickle of smuggled weapons coming in from Syria, as well, but that will soon stop entirely if it hasn't already. What Saddam has now to fight with is all he's ever going to have. In fact, it's more than he's going to have, because he's losing it a bit at a time to air strikes.

While our forces are reorganizing for the next phase and cleaning up their lengthy supply lines, our aircraft are "tank plinking" - taking out the Iraqi armored vehicles concealed in towns and villages or dug into camouflaged positions. One by one.

Put yourself in the place of an Iraqi tanker who has just seen another tank go up in flames a quarter of a mile away - without even glimpsing the source of the attack. That psychological pressure is almost as important in triggering the final collapse of Iraq's military as is the physical destruction.

The conventional Iraqi military capability is declining, day by day, irreversibly. Men and equipment and supplies are being lost, and not being replaced.

But that's not the case with us. Our ground combat formations have hardly been damaged. They're getting resupplied now. Three American divisions are moving into the theater. The Navy and Air Force get bombs and missiles from supply ships to replace the ones they've used. Our power in the theater is rising, even as our helicopters and jets continue to degrade the combat value of the Republican Guard.

Note that it's not being done to us. During this "lull" our units are resting, getting more supplies, taking care of maintenance and getting their equipment ready for more combat, and not seeing any enemy threats in their sky. Iraq's air force has been a total no-show, and they've only fired a handful of missiles. (So far.) What we've seen, rather, amounts to little more than harassment.

One car-bomb and a handful of sniper attacks in a town in the rear may be an "unexpectedly strong showing" by Iraq, but it's militarily insignificant compared to the effects of a hundred strike bombers attacking a RG division near Baghdad.

But a reporter sees the results of that car bomb. He may even have come to know some of the four Marines it killed. Coming from a peaceful existence and never having directly experienced war, it seems like an unimaginable catastrophe. On the other hand, he doesn't see what it's like on the ground in the Iraqi positions when the bombs start to fall.

We're doing a hell of a lot more than we're being done unto.

Well, yeah. But the Iraqis were expected to die in droves; that's why the point spread in the war was so huge coming in. See, it isn't about the absolute results, it's about whether each side is "building momentum" by "doing better than expected".

Only it isn't. This war won't be decided by a poll of reporters at the end who vote about which side won. Maybe that works for NCAA football, but in war victory comes from concrete success on the battlefield, and that's evaluated on a more prosaic basis.

It's not really about body count. The fact that you kill more enemy than you lose doesn't mean you win, as Viet Nam clearly proved. But that doesn't mean it's irrelevant that we're killing far more Iraqi soldiers than we're losing, or destroying far more of their equipment and supplies than we're losing. Those things don't guarantee victory, but we can't win any longer without them.

The only real way that expectations would matter is if they were actually held by our leaders and our voters, and if failing to live up to them actually caused us to lose heart and to withdraw. But for all the nattering by the press, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair show no sign of weakening, and polls of American voter opinion show clearly that a strong majority of us recognize that this war could take a while and cost us a lot of casualties and that we still think we should go on.

There is no point spread in war.