IMNSHO, it doesn't have an impact.
btw, I have to say that your recent assessment of Wpost lack that great media critical edge of the other day.! They are reporting difficulties for a reason. Psyops, baybee, psyops. Ya gotta be just as cynical about news that you "like" as you are with news that your "don't like".
These reports are coming from _embedded_ reporters. Everything they get and everything they write is approved beforehand.
The other day, CNN aired a lengthy piece on how exhausted the troops were. They fought for 72 hrs. straight. They showed pictures of exhausted kids sleeping on the deck, 1 foot apart, dressed in full gear, zonked out after they'd been been heliported back to the carrier. They spoke of the boys and girls sleeping while they're standing. etc. After my visceral reaction was over, I asked myself why they would plant a "human interest" story on CNN that made things look so awful, that chalked it up to the fact that we need more reinforcements.
Why would they want to look bad?
1. our soldiers aren't pussies. look at how tough they are. we're no longer air war cowards, a tag that plagues us, right? (well, one that plagues THEM, the warriors)
2. we can shed the 80s image of the vol. army as a bunch of dummies and wussies who could barely understand the technologies they worked with--technologies they killed themselves with in GW1.
They are reporting difficulties for a reason. Psyops, baybee, psyops. Ya gotta be just as cynical about news that you "like" as you are with news that your "don't like".
Now, this doesn't mean things aren't going badly (relatively speaking). It only means that they are presenting the information that it's going badly for a reason. And it ain't in the interest of Truth, Just Us, and the American Waitress.
Of course, my position--my reading of the war party faction is that they expected and needed this war to be a little more tough than "normal." It's part of the plan. Also, re: Stalingrad. If you read PNAC, that was their battle plan in 1997.
kelley