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*Briefing the Enemy* *Editorial of The New York Sun | February 21, 2015* *http://www.nysun.com/editorials/briefing-the-enemy/89058/ <http://www.nysun.com/editorials/briefing-the-enemy/89058/>* “Spoofing the War” was the editorial we issued back in September, when the Obama administration started telegraphing our strategy for attacking ISIS. We ran the full transcript of the famous Saturday Night Live Cold Open <http://www.nysun.com/editorials/spoofing-the-war/88842/> mocking the press for its fever to know how we were going to attack Saddam Hussein’s army at Kuwait. That was back in 1991. Even discounting for that today, we almost fell out of our socks when we read the dispatch in the New York Times in respect of the pending attack on the ISIS stronghold at Mosul. And we gather we’re not the only ones. It turns out that the disclosures made by Central Command briefers to the Times and other press prompted Senator McCain to blow his famous stack. He and Senator Graham fired off to the President what the Times called a “blistering” letter. “Never in our memory can we recall an instance in which our military has knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies,” Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham wrote, according to the Times. What was Central Command thinking? According to the Times, American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon “are struggling to determine how difficult it will be to retake Mosul.” The pending fight is for what the Times calls the “Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq.” The Times disclosed that this is “becoming a major test of the Obama administration’s strategy to stop the spread of the terrorist group in the Middle East.” Maybe we’re just old fashioned, but in our day — Vietnam — every credentialed reporter signed a set of ground rules. One couldn’t, say, report details of friendly casualties while a battle was in progress; or name a unit involved in combat below the — if we recall correctly — brigade level. Or identify a weapon that brought down a friendly aircraft. The most sacred rule was that one couldn’t report our military operations in advance. Yet here in the digital age, where news moves at the speed of pixels, was the Times reporting that the battle for Mosul “is planned for as early as April.” It quoted our intelligence agencies as saying that they “do not yet know whether Islamic State fighters will dig in and defend Mosul to the death or whether, fearing encirclement, most fighters will slip out of the city for other Iraqi towns or cross the border into Syria, leaving behind a smaller force and booby-trapping buildings with bombs to tie down and bloody thousands of Iraqi troops.” It’s not our purpose here to question the patriotism of the New York Times. It’s the administration that seems to be precipitating these disclosures. The Times itself seemed amazed, even as it carried details of the pending attack. It disclosed that “the strategy is to draw on five of the most experienced Iraqi Army brigades, about 10,000 troops in all.” It reported our side’s “doubts about the readiness of Iraq’s ground forces, which have struggled to recapture smaller towns that pose far less of a challenge than Mosul.” American air power, it reported, “will be critical to helping the Iraqi and Kurdish forces advance.” It said Mr. Obama will have decide whether “teams of American joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, need to be on the ground.” The reason for that is “so that the airstrikes can be delivered precisely.” Just in case that wasn’t clear, Times added that such teams, “if deployed, would most likely need to be protected by Special Operations forces.” Incredulity at its own disclosures ripples through the Times dispatch. “American officials,” it reported, took “the unusual step” of announcing “the timing of the battle and the number of Iraqi and Kurdish forces to be deployed.” It noted that “openly discussing future military operations” is “normally off-limits to avoid aiding the enemy, but American officials said it was done this time to try to weaken the resolve of the Islamic State fighters and to spur Mosul’s residents to rise up against the occupiers and help the Iraqi ground forces.” It’s been a generation now since Saturday Night Live aired that Cold Open on the Desert Storm press briefing. We’ll never forget one of America’s greatest editors saying to us at the time that it may have marked the beginning of the decline of the American press. “They’re not laughing with us,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.” Then again, we went on to win that war, because President George H.W. Bush sent, under General Schwarzkopf, an enormous air, land, and sea expedition. 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