Thanks to Lexington Green from Chicago Boys for a head’s up on a recent interview with The Man:

The Inquirer: To scan the media, one might think people were starting to believe less and less in the “war on terror.” When you hear that, what goes through your mind?

Robert D. Kaplan: What goes through my mind is how little our public knows about what the American military does abroad. In Iraq, in general, there isn’t enough media coverage about what our troops are actually doing in tactical operations centers, in increasing bonding operations with the Iraqi people and security forces. There’s altogether too much media emphasis on the tales told by those either fighting or back home and no longer fighting. The public is not conditioned to appreciate the full complexity of our actual operations in Iraq – instead, they are conditioned to feel sorry for the soldiers who are there.

As for the war on terror, it really is a global war, in the sense that we have global deployments in many countries in any given week. In Africa, we stretch from Senegal to Djibouti, and yet there is no coverage of it. None of these operations is secret. Same with our missions in places like Colombia or the Philippines – all of them fall under the rubric of the war on terror. The American public is thus being misinformed and operates in a bubble of ignorance. Off the coast of Somalia, for instance, we’ve been successful in helping people in Mogadishu, but you see little coverage of it. In Afghanistan, we’ve gone a long way toward rebuilding the cell phone system there – not covered. What we get is the car bombing or the suicide bombing on Yahoo – otherwise, nothing about Afghanistan.

It’s not a right-left bias, just an “incident bias.” If there’s an incident, it’s covered; if not, not. Processes are hard to cover, and a lot of what we’re doing abroad involves processes.

Inquirer: Are we finding terrorists? Are we fighting terror directly?

[...]

Read the rest:

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « A World Divided
• » Bin Laden’s New Video