In truth, the United States media and political culture accept different rules of military discourse that are politically governed. Had George Bush recently called for a land invasion of Pakistan, he would have incurred hysterical wrath. The same would be true had a Sen. Orin Hatch or John Warner once declared U.S. pilots analogous to Luftwaffe criminals or Soviet terror strafers, when their bombs went awry and killed civilians during the Clinton aerial campaign over Serbia.

Our officers may expect that a Republican Congress and administration might given them greater latitude in determining how and how long to wage war in Iraq. Yet they also must accept that ipso facto they will be subject to far greater criticism from the American intellectual and journalistic establishment.

IV. From YouTube to Cingular
This is the first extended American ground war in the era of instantaneous global communications. The 1991 Gulf War was short — and in the age before on-the scene reporting of Al-Jazeera and other Middle East news agencies that ape western splashy graphics and delivery, but ultimately must slant in accordance to autocratic dictates. Even during the Serbian bombing a mere decade ago, poor civilians on the ground were not able to easily email, or cell phone daily reports, or post videos on the Internet.

But now an errant bomb or single rogue jailer in Abu Ghraib will be blared live — in raw and unedited fashion without much of a context — to a housewife in Frankfurt or a farmer in Anatolia. Any single untoward incident can splash across the computer screens of billions, and serve as an instant referendum on the service of tens of thousands of American soldiers.

The result is that U.S. military officials recognize that any possible strike on the Syria border would be broadcast worldwide as carpet bombing of a wedding party or tribal reunion, while the enemy’s mass beheadings and torture will often go unreported.

My favorite example this week was a syndicated photo of a poor elderly Iraqi woman holding up two bullets with the caption: “An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)”. The only problem was all that was the bullets shown were unfired and still in their casings!

Remember the operational principle of the new “right-now” communications: There is no news or reward in recounting that barbarous terrorists or savage governments murder innocents, but a great deal if accidental deaths can be pinned on the United States. The former earns a journalist no audience, but often real danger — the latter safety, praise, a possible award, book contract, or university guest lectureship.

Gen. Petraeus, then, knows that an oft-handed remark by a senior officer to a “friendly” interviewer in an hour could appear as a negative headline across the Drudge Report — or the lurid tall tales of an Army Private playacting as Seymour Hersh headlining an issue of The New Republic.

V. The Oil Bogeyman
American military options in the Middle East are also circumscribed by a global oil market — even more so than during the Cold War fear of a counter-reaction from the Soviet Union. We are in an era of seemingly perpetual petroleum scarcity, one far worse even than the oil boycotts of old that were shortages by intent and directed solely at the West.

With new players like the Indians and Chinese in the Middle East oil market, and globalized hourly speculation, anything the United States military might do in the Middle East — from taking out an Iranian gunboat to accidentally hitting a pipeline — could evoke furious reaction from newly industrial oil dependents.

Even the appearance of disruption may cost billions of Chinese, Indian, European, or American consumers billions of dollars. Should a military officer think it necessary at some point to request a border strike on a Syrian terrorist camp, or an Iranian IED factory, he must weigh the real possibility that oil speculators in minutes might immediately bid up the price of oil by billions of dollars — with Cabinet and banking officials screaming for his scalp.

What do these new burdens all mean? In the last quarter-century American has proved that it can use military force in the Middle East, in a conventional context, to obtain desirable results — the restoration of Kuwait, the removal of the Taliban, and the end of the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein.

But even those successful operations did not occur in a vacuum, but immediately raised the logical question “What next?”

Increasingly what follows will be a liberal Western superpower, adopting rules of engagement that reflect its own idealism fighting against a primordial terrorists, in pursuit of democratic reform — sometimes under conservative Republican administrations vulnerable to charges of militarism, while being scrutinized by a global media eager for signs of either American hypocrisy or weakness, and a world jittery over world petroleum prices.

Should Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker stabilize Iraq, it will demonstrate that the United States, under the most impossible of conditions, can still defeat Islamic terrorism while fostering constitutional reform that improves the security of the region and the world at large — and due so irrespective of a hostile world media and partisan politicking at home.

But if they cannot?

The ultimate irony: The seventh-century terrorists win — and those who habitually demonized American military operations will themselves lose as well.

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