I'm a believer in giving the Devil his due, and I've never seen anything more devilish than Iraq.
Wretchard reports on three separate but eerily similar incidents of journalists being "captured" by Fallujah insurgents.
The journalists are taken to a picturesque location where they are first greeted with hostility, then granted surprising liberty. A sense of shared danger bonds them with their captors. Scenes are provided to lend color. Due to a surprising coincidence, the captured journalists stumble on information every Western intelligence agency wants to know. The preparations to defend the Golden Mosque, the fate of the missing German counterterrorism agents. Then, as quickly as they were captured, they are released. Not for them is the long and slow incarceration of Terry Waite, but a hearty goodbye, encumbered only by the promise that they will tell the world the truth, on their word as Americans or Englishmen.This sounds like a disinformation operation targeting journalists. Maybe their captors went to the same school.
That is smart. That is NOT the sort of thing that gets put together by some insurgents on the fly. It's the result of trained folks in psy-ops, and plenty of planning and training. As Wretchard says, it's Special Forces, but whose Special Forces?
Our traditions of fair play in politics (don't laugh, it's relative) leave us squeamish about propaganda. Just as we don't do torture. It's Just Not Done. The problem is that this leaves us at a severe disadvantage in a struggle that is as much or more psychological as physical.
Yeah, we're killing terrorists and insurgents whenever they stick their heads up. And they're kicking our ass in the propaganda war.
Kicking. Our. Ass.
In the big picture, that's a more important battle than any given few square miles of stinking desert.
We need to get serious about this. We need to train Arabic speakers. We need multiple TV channels. We need TV crews controlled by the military to tell our side of the story. Ok, so it's not "fair & balanced", so what? I'm interested in winning, because that saves lives. The other side is fighting dirty in the propaganda war and we shouldn't be squeamish about telling the truth in a way that favors us. We owe it to our people, and our soldiers.
Yo, Rummy, while you're re-inventing the military, how about getting us at least up to parity with the Islamists in propaganda capability?