I haven’t been trying very hard to find out what’s going on in Iraq. I don’t have TV and wouldn’t have the time to watch it anyway, the news­pa­pers are heavy on unhelpful analysis and light on reli­able facts, and unfor­tu­nateley Enemy Combatant Radio hasn’t set up a Basra satel­lite van.

(note to self: is ECR still casting these days?)

It’s also a ques­tion­able under­taking. Do I really want to try and find out the details of the war? What would it ben­efit me? Is half truth or even ³⁄₄ truth better than no truth at all? Do any of the details have any par­tic­ular bearing on my life?

If an average person did want to find out what was hap­pening on the ground in Iraq, could it be done? This is, after all, the infor­ma­tion age. The internet and an asso­ci­ated suite of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies indis­putably changed the process and quality of the antiwar move­ment in a way that has been alledged/​predicted since the anti-​​globalization “battle of Seattle”. If you stay very quiet and listen to the aca­d­e­mics mut­tering to them­selves in their closets, you will learn that infor­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion is now really, really pending a rev­o­lu­tion cour­tesy of audio blog­ging, photo blog­ging, plain ‘old’ blog­ging, text mes­saging, wikis and CMSs (gra­cias Chiron), blue­Pods and their inevitable ilk, news​.google​.com–esque infor­ma­tion fil­tering algo­rithms and other things I’m not quiet enough to be aware of.

But can it be done now? Can you or I, given a PC and an internet account, get a gen­uine sense of what’s hap­pening? I cer­tainly don’t know, mostly because I haven’t tried. A few pos­sible resources for someone who was trying:

glob​alse​cu​rity​.org offers a truck stop break­fast sized serving of oper­a­tional details. Or it did, I don’t know if they’ve been able to keep up with troop move­ments and whatnot since the combat proper began. Interestingly, they also offer a serious point-​​counterpoint on the strate­gical ben­e­fits of the inva­sion, and a decent library of anti-​​war graphics. If you’re really bored, you could just play “guess their per­sonal opinion”.

Iraqwar​.Ru offers daily exec­u­tive sum­maries of the bat­tles. I am told third-​​hand that the “This center was cre­ated recently by a group of jour­nal­ists and mil­i­tary experts from Russia to pro­vide accu­rate and up-​​to-​​date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. Daily english-​​language trans­la­tions are being offered by Venik’s Aviation. A brief scan of the reports sug­gest that they are either markedly unfriendly to the US/​British forces, or the bat­tles are going much more poorly than we are being led to believe be CNN.

Several inter­cepted reports by the US field com­man­ders stated that their troops are unable to advance due to their sol­diers being demor­al­ized by the enemy’s fierce resis­tance and high losses.

Kevin Site’s war blog used to pro­vide a dra­matic example of the power of direct pub­lishing. As a CNN war cor­re­spon­dant on the ground in the middle east, Kevin was well set up to pro­vide very inter­esting cov­erage. His own remarks that “This expe­ri­ence has really made me rethink my rather orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media.… Blogging is an incred­ible tool, with amazing poten­tial. ” are indica­tive of at least the poten­tial for real infor­ma­tion flow from places from which infor­ma­tion is a hotly con­tested mate­rial. Unfortunatley, CNN requested that he stop blog­ging. Much has been said of this, in chat-​​room dis­cus­sion and publications.

Iraq Body Count goes the other way, offering con­text­less aggre­gate sta­tis­tics fil­tered from the ceas­less tor­rent of mass media, rather than inde­pen­danly ver­i­fied on-​​site details. The method­ology is based on past work to doc­u­ment the cit­izen death toll in Afghanistan. It doesn’t count actual death tolls, only reported cit­izen fatal­i­ties. But it is infor­ma­tion that oth­er­wise isn’t being com­piled. This is the site that powers the banner-​​counter on this blog.

news​.google​.com is a way to dip a net of one’s own into the river of mass-​​media reporting. Google uses a purely-​​automated algo­rithm, pre­sum­ably related to their famous page-​​ranking system, to mon­itor many news sources in real­time and sum­ma­rize the most “sig­nif­i­cant” sto­ries in fre­quenly updated lists.

Then of course, there’s this.

Of these links, only the second two seem to be using tech­no­log­ical changes to make more directly-​​sourced infor­ma­tion avail­able. There may well be other methods. There cer­tainly will be in the future. The pos­sible impli­ca­tions of these maybe-​​existing sources of fact-​​distribution would seem to include the ability for cit­i­zens to stay better informed of the dis­tant actions of their gov­ern­ments, as well as pro­viding a much larger heap of data for ana­lysts and his­to­rians to process in after-​​the-​​fact attempts to dis­sect what really happened.