On Lawfare, Robert Chesney points out that we’ve struck the Libyan city of Sirte roughly 100 times in the last month in an effort to dislodge ISIL. In his mind, here’s the remarkable bit:
Why so little attention [in the media]? Part of it is that Trump coverage is eating up so much media space. Part of it is that, after fifteen years, stories of this kind just aren’t grabbing the public’s attention as easily. And part of it is that the strikes seem primarily if not exclusively to involve scenarios at or near what is passing for a “front line” between ISIL forces in Sirte and US-backed forces trying to drive them out. But I wonder if part of the neglect also stems from the fact that we are using manned aircraft and helicopters rather than drones; it’s hard to fit the Libya story into the familiar drone-mania framing, after all.
There are other ways to read it, if you’re a partisan.
By not mentioning Obama taking decisive action against ISIL, the media narrative skews against him.
They’re against the military.
They’re for the military by not scaring off potential recruits.
More crowd my mind, but I think I’ll let them go – they tire me. Honestly, as an Irish software engineer once told me during a visit to the States, “Your country is so big! I can’t blame you for not paying attention to the rest of the world, you can’t even keep up with your own country!”
Add in a dose of inevitable provincialism, a presidential election, and I’m afraid the ugly bits of news that can be hard to understand – international politics – gets squeezed out.
