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March 19th, 2003

Now that the news media is in war cheerleading mode ... [Mar. 19th, 2003|09:45 am]
Okrzyki, przyjaciel!
Atomly posted an article that refers in passing to 'Operation Millennium' -- a war game the US Armed Forces ran last year. I remember something vague about this from last year, but given that Atomly's article was by one of those ax-to-grind types, I wanted to check up on it.

What I found was kind of interesting: I did an alltheweb search on
"Operation Millenium Challenge" "Paul Van Riper"
. I only found 2 references -- which you can look at yourself. There was a link to a UK Guardian article at warblogging.com which is as close as you get to any kind of 'respectable' news report. You can Read it here if you're interested.

So here's what has me confused. The US Military paid $250 million for a war game exercise, and then cheated to win when one retired Marine decided to play for real? That seems like a big story, especially today. Yet ... who besides the Guardian really covered it?

Washington Post Page 6 August 17

A columnist for the San Diego Tribune wrote about it in November.

Not a lot else. It wasn't 'news' apparently, even though it really happened. CNN never covered it. An Op-Ed in the New York Times mentions it.

I wonder if Saddam Hussein does web searches -- he could pick up a pretty wicked battle plan against the US, one that the US Military apparently didn't take very seriously.

But the big lesson is that you have to spend a lot of time digging to find out what's really going on. Maybe that's why people have so many obvious misconceptions about Bush and Iraq and Al Qaeda -- they don't dig, they don't check sources, and they don't even give 'All Things Considered' a quarter of their attention on the way home. Some large percentage of people in the US apparently think that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, something you won't hear Bush contradict in any public announcement. Of course this was a factoid I heard on the Daily Show, with no citation, and I've had no luck turning up any real citation of the poll on the web.
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