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

• Author: Reynolds, Glenn Harlan

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...