Note: With Jeff G allegedly returning full-time on Monday, I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity to post rambling pieces like this one.
What is the nature of the global war on terror? Is calling it a global war on terror a step in the wrong direction? To what extent is it fought in and shaped by shaped by the global media environment? Is the US ignoring, or not sufficiently focusing on useful strategies and tactics for a war being fought in the Internet Age?
These are all questions posed—directly and indirectly—by “Knowing the Enemy,” an article by George Packer that ran in The New Yorker last month. The article, which profiles social scientists working on such issues, got a lot less attention in the blogosphere (outside milblogs) than it deserved (despite some flaws more attributable to Packer than his subjects). The silver lining is that the lack of attention gives me opportunity to comment without simply rehashing points made about it elsewhere.
The article’s primary subject is David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel “on loan†to the US government. Kilcullen would like the US to see the GWoT in part as as a global counter-insurgency against terror. He would also urge the US to see it as multi-faceted as the Cold War, which was many wars, constructed in many different models, fought in many different ways: a nuclear standoff between the superpowers, insurgencies in developing countries, a struggle of ideas in Europe.
Packer begins with Kilcullen’s experiences observing insurgencies in West Java and East Timor:
Indonesia’s failure to replicate in East Timor its victory in West Java later influenced Kilcullen’s views about what the Bush Administration calls the “global war on terror.†In both instances, the Indonesian military used the same harsh techniques, including forced population movements, coercion of locals into security forces, stringent curfews, and even lethal pressure on civilians to take the government side. The reason that the effort in East Timor failed, Kilcullen concluded, was globalization. In the late nineties, a Timorese international propaganda campaign and ubiquitous media coverage prompted international intervention, thus ending the use of tactics that, in the obscure jungles of West Java in the fifties, outsiders had known nothing about. “The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now,†Kilcullen said.
Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?†he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy.â€Â
Indeed, Al Qaeda continues to develop a global media strategy. Some in the US media have become aware of this, but it has not stopped them from playing into it.
Kilcullen is interested in the information warfare involved in the current conflict, but he also recommends a counter-insurgency strategy of acting locally:
In a counterinsurgency, according to the classical doctrine, which was first laid out by the British general Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency, armed force is only a quarter of the effort; political, economic, and informational operations are also required. A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate†insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad. Kilcullen writes, “Just as the Containment strategy was central to the Cold War, likewise a Disaggregation strategy would provide a unifying strategic conception for the warâ€â€something that has been lacking to date.†As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success had more to do with luck than with strategy.
Actually, it had a lot to do with the fact that the United States is enormously compassionate and its military is extraordinarily good in delivering aid swiftly to just about any place in the world. Of course, this did not stop a senior UN bureaucrat from calling the US “stingy.” Its should also be noted that since the UN took over the lead role in this area in early 2005, the money is being soaked up by overhead, favorable opinion of the US in Indonesia has dropped, the flow of foreign cash for reconstruction has allowed the government to spend scarce money on a new bureaucracy and religious police to enforce sharia law. Kilcullen may not see that as a serious problem, so long as the radicals there do not become part of a global jihad network. A disaggregation strategy and information warfare strategy and tactics will not always align. However, to the extent that radical Islamic governments tend to harbor terror camps for global terror networks, I suspect that he might care.
Packer does provide an example of where Kilcullen thinks disaggregation and information warfare strategies do align:
By speaking of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Taliban, the Iranian government, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda in terms of one big war, Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,†Kilcullen said. He pointedly avoided describing this as the Administration’s approach. “You say, ‘Actually, there are sixty different groups in sixty different countries who all have different objectives. Let’s not talk about bin Laden’s objectivesâ€â€let’s talk about your objectives. How do we solve that problem?’ †In other words, the global ambitions of the enemy don’t automatically demand a monolithic response.
There is merit to this point… up to a point. Certainly, the US response to global terror networks need not be monolithic. However, Kilcullen’s point—as presented by Packer, anyway—ignores two other, possibly countervailing, factors.
The first is domestic politics. It has been historically true, and remains true today, that the citizenry of the US is generally not inclined to fight protracted wars. Domestic support for the Cold War tended to wane among those segments of the public who did not see Communism as a global threat. It is unknowable whether the US would have won the Cold War had our leaders presented it to the public primarily as a disaggregated collection of conflicts (though I agree that it was properly addressed as such as a practical matter).
Second, there is a ceiling to the benefit of not playing into the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight. Osama bin Laden said in October 2001,”This battle is not between al Qaeda and the US. This is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders.” Thus, in videotaped statements, at least two of the 9/11 terrorists asserted that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Given that the US helped save Muslims in Bosnia and had no involvement in Chechnya, the US rhetorically treating the threats as disaggregated may make a marginal difference at best. Kilcullen was looking at similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor. What seems lacking is a recognition that the Islamist information strategy of making it all one fight derives directly from religious belief that sees all of their struggles as interrelated (even if OBL now exploits it well beyond reason). That does not mean the US cannot or should not act locally to short-circuit local conditions that help global terror groups recruit new members. It does mean we have to recognize that the ambitions of the global terror networks are indeed global.
Indeed, according to Packer, “[t]he more Kilcullen travels to the various theatres of war, the less he thinks that the lessons of Malaya and Vietnam are useful guides in the current conflict,” quoting a Kilcullen article: “We need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency.” Kilcullen notes that many US units in Afghanistan are executing the new counter-insurgency field manual’s tactics “brilliantly,”
But the Taliban seem to be waging a different war, driven entirely by information operations. “They’re essentially armed propaganda organizations,†Kilcullen said. “They switch between guerrilla activity and terrorist activity as they need to, in order to maintain the political momentum, and it’s all about an information operation that generates the perception of an unstoppable, growing insurgency.â€Â
The phenomenon itself is not new; the use of global media to convince the world of the truth of the “myth of the guerrilla” is at least as old as the Tet Offensive. What is new, as noted by “Grim” at the link, is the global scale of the effort—from local efforts to intimidate Afghan farmers in the dead of night to the use of the Internet for propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising purposes. As to the local threats:
Kilcullen doesn’t believe that an entirely “soft†counterinsurgency approach can work against such tactics. In his view, winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like youâ€â€as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believeâ€â€but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion.
As for the global aspects of the strategy:
An information strategy seems to be driving the agenda of every radical Islamist movement. Kilcullen noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, “they’re not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They’re doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee.â€Â
***
The result is an intimidated or motivated population, and a spike in fund-raising and recruiting. “When you go on YouTube and look at one of these attacks in Iraq, all you see is the video,†Kilcullen said. “If you go to some jihadist Web sites, you see the same video and then a button next to it that says, ‘Click here and donate.’†The Afghan or Iraqi or Lebanese insurgent, unlike his Vietnamese or Salvadoran predecessor, can plug into a global media network that will instantly amplify his message.
Yet jihadi propaganda proliferates on YouTube, while anti-jihad videos are being yanked and flagged as “inappropriate.” Now that YouTube is being purchased by Google, the service intends to provide tools to media companies to flag copyright violations. One would hope—probably in vain—that it could devote some time and tech know-how to deterring global terror networks from using its service as a recruitment and fundraising tool. And maybe Packer’s article on the value of airing enemy propaganda should be required reading at CNN before it airs its next sniper video.
“The international information environment is critical to the success of America’s mission,†Kilcullen said.
In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America’s information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, “We’ve done a similar thing in Iraqâ€â€we’ve arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we’re totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way.â€Â
However careful Kilcullen is not to criticize Administration policy, his argument amounts to a thoroughgoing critique. As a foreigner who is not a career official in the U.S. government, he has more distance and freedom to discuss the war on jihadism frankly, and in ways that his American counterparts rarely can. “It’s now fundamentally an information fight,†he said. “The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that, and I think that’s why we’re losing.â€Â
This is not entirely true. Bill Roggio, while embedded in Iraq last December, talked to the troops and relayed that
Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.
Imagine that. Really, you don’t have to imagine it, as a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor dismissed this opinion as disconnected from reality. Of course, this columnist attributed that opinion to Bill Roggio, not the troops he interviewed. This same columnist is a senior associate at something called “the Project for Excellence in Journalism.” So when Kilcullen says “we” don’t get that, he might have been referring to writers for the Christian Science Monitor or the New Yorker more than troops in the sandbox.
The theme Packer wanted to push in his article was the failure of the Administration to fully draw upon the talents of social scientists like Kilcullen in addressing the threat of terrorism. Kilcullen, however, is not your average social scientist, who is not also a lieutenant colonel. Kilcullen introduced Packer to an anthropologist and Pentagon consultant named Montgomery McFate, whose profile is probably more typical:
McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. *** She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. “When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War,†McFate said. “That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that’s happening now is, without taking that too far, similar.â€Â
Packer attempts to address the “root cause” of the US failure to more fully use experts like Kilcullen and McFate:
Kilcullen, who calls counterinsurgency “armed social science,†told me, “This is fundamentally about the broken relationship between the government and the discipline of anthropology. What broke that relationship is Vietnam. And people still haven’t recovered from that.†As a result, a complex human understanding of societies at war has been lost. “But it didn’t have to be lost,†McFate said. During the Second World War, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer, and Ruth Benedict provided the Allied war effort with essential insights into Asian societies.
I suspect Packer probably understood those comments as an indictment of the US military and the current Administration. But he inadvertently notes the problem may be slightly different than he supposes. Packer writes about Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, and is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person “human terrain†teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours.
So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. “I do not want to get anybody killed,†she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. “I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties,†she said.
It appears that our government and military are trying to get social scientists to help win the war, but that the academics have ethical problems with helping, and will shun those who do. Perhaps this is what Kilcullen really meant when he told Packer that Vietnam broke the relationship between the government and social scientists. Perhaps our academies are stocked largely with anthropologists who vocally oppose the Administration and even publicly hope for disaster.
Fondacaro continued:
“A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield.†I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,†Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.†He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.†But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking.
Perhaps I am more jaded than Fondacaro. The reality is that the US military announced its investigation and had already taken significant action before the press turned Abu Ghraib into a cause celebre in April 2004. The reality is that the press did so in April because it obtained pictures of the abuse, by means of what the American Thinker characterized as having “all the marks of a well thoughtâ€â€out information warfare campaign” aimed at deflecting responsibility from those directly involved to those up the chain of command, not least the reviled SecDef, Donald Rumsfeld. Forcaro’s advice would be entirely sound if one views Abu Ghraib through a political lens; it has long been a staple of political damage-control ops to “hang a lantern” on your own problem. The US military, however, was and is rightly obliged to treat the matter as a criminal proceeding, the fairness of which would surely have been attacked by the ACLU and others had the military dumped the photos and harsh criticism on those still under investigation.
Moreover, even if the military had done so, there is no reason to believe that we would have been spared the UK Mirror’s publication of phony Abu Ghraib photos. Or that we would have been spared the phony Abu Ghraib interview published in the New York Times.
One of the things “Grim” thinks would help implement Kilcullen’s approach would be to teach Americans a general understanding of tribalism:
We must also show them the value of our society in terms that will mean something to an honor-based tribal society.
The best thing that we can do for America is to return to teaching heroic epics. We need to teach Americans how to be heroes—how to think about and value honor, shame, and wisdom amid violence.
American soldiers are our first and often our best ambassadors. When they behave as heroes, and believe in heroism, a tribal society responds. When they know how to speak of those concepts in a Western context, the tribal society learns that the West is not decadent—it too has honor.
Do you doubt it? Perhaps you should read again of the “Lions of Tall Afar.”
Instead, the western mass media largely ignores the heroism of our troops, while providing extensive coverage to scandals like Abu Ghraib and Haditha—even phony coverage.
Back to Packer:
Kilcullen is attempting to revive a strain of Cold War thought that saw the confrontation with Communism not primarily as a blunt military struggle but as a subtle propaganda war that required deep knowledge of diverse enemies and civilian populations. By this standard, America’s performance against radical Islamists thus far is dismal.
****
When I asked him to outline a counter-propaganda strategy, he described three basic methods. “We’ve got to create resistance to their message,†he said. “We’ve got to co-opt or assist people who have a counter-message. And we might need to consider creating or supporting the creation of rival organizations.†[Former RAND Corporation analyst ] Bruce Hoffman told me that jihadists have posted five thousand Web sites that react quickly and imaginatively to events. In 2004, he said, a jihadist rap video called “Dirty Kuffar†became widely popular with young Muslims in Britain: “It’s like Ali G wearing a balaclava and having a pistol in one hand and a Koran in the other.†Hoffman believes that America must help foreign governments and civil-society groups flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites presenting anti-jihadist messagesâ€â€but not necessarily pro-American ones, and without leaving American fingerprints.
Good luck with that. The mass media, starting with the Los Angeles Times, took great delight in blowing the cover of information ops being conducted in Iraq by the Lincoln Group. The sarcasm-soaked coverage of the Washington Post is a particularly ripe example of this. Cori Dauber correctly noted the cynicism of the press in justifying blowing these ops:
As others have noted, there seemed to be an exquisite sensitivity to the relationship between keeping classified information secret and national security when it came to, say, the identity of a covert employee of the CIA, yet here an entire operation was blown and the justification for doing so was in part concern that such operations were unwise precisely because, when blown, they do great damage to the country. (Emphasis in original.)
But if Sen. Edward M. Kennedy called it “a devious scheme to place favorable propaganda in Iraqi newspapers,” something had to be done.
Indeed, the Lincoln Group was recently trotted out as a strawman-cum-bogeyman in the AP’s defense of the so-called “Burning Six story.”
It would seem that the attitudes of the mass media, politicians like Ted Kennedy and academics like Nicholas DeGenova are at least as much an impediment to implementing the Kilcullen approach as any resistance within the Administration. It could even be argued that the former is one likely reason for the latter.
very nice, excellent work, Karl.
Good job Karl. Thanks.
There is a solution, global in scope, which is also effective at the local level: kill every single fucker that broadcasts, in any way, shape or form, jihadist rhetoric meant to incite populations to turn a frowny face toward the West.
There should not be an Al Jazeera network when we’ve got cruise missiles stacked like cord wood. Kill every cameraman, commentator, newsreader, electrician, janitor, receptionist, vice president, owner, shareholder, reporter and makeup artist related with jihadist expression.
I didn’t really like Gilligan’s Island as a kid. But if it was the only thing on TV after a hard day moping through junior high, I watched it.
Give them 24/7 Nickelodeon and nothing else, and we’ll win this thing.
We have to make them like it.
I suspect the cultural differences hurt us if we try to tout our aid given to Muslims. It’s either treated as simply giving them their due (jizyha) or as an insult, treating them as if they cannot take care of themselves. Plus, any presence of armed non-Muslims is turned into “oppression” because, invariably, we’re stopping them from running amok as much as keeping them from being victims.
As for working with anthropologists, yeah, it’s not that the military doesn’t want to, but that the political leanings of the profession work against it.
Nice one, Karl. I put up my own little take at http://coldfury.com/index.php/?p=7702
Bill Roggio says of the troops:
I’m sorry, but it’s impossible to abandon whom they never supported in the first place.
I agree with the others. Good post, Karl, thanks.
Good post Karl.
I have a slightly different take on the informational war. The article states that
While I agree with this, I think that it is this administration and the military that are slow on the uptake of this new front because they are only just beginning to realize the importance of this very crucial aspect of asymmetrical warfare.
However, while the military is only just now realizing its error, the media and the left in our country have long understood that framing the story and getting it out there first is most important because that is what will create the first impression and it is the first impression that is the most lasting.
The framing of the war in Vietnam to the American public is a classic cas in point.
I would say that in the political arena, especially since the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, that information operations have been de riguer.
What we have presently, is a mainstream media that by and large sides with the opposing party and both have used informational warfare to politicize the conflict for partisan gain far more effectively than this administration. To wit,
The media have also exposed the govenment’s use of surveillance of telephone traffic and the tracing of financial transactions to create a paranoia among gullable segments of the public. The use of phony news, e.g. Rathergate and the fauxtography of the Israeli/Hizzbollah conflict last summer, etc. The media has even under reported good economic news and done its best to suggest economic problems in the face of some of the lowest interest rates, unemployment figures and greatest prosperity in living memory in an effort to undermine this administration’s effectiveness.
The last administration understood well the value of getting your message out and framing the narrative to their advantage. They even had a ‘war room’ set up just for this purpose.
This is what we saw in the 90’s with the aid of a complicit media.
The enemy in this conflict are far more effective at contolling the message because locally, they can eliminate or intimidate oppossing messengers and their messages. We on the otherhand have to contend with a media that is actively working against us. Additionally, we can not use the same methods in the local arena to influence and control the message nor do we really want to since that wouldundermine the messageweare trying to deliver.
I do not see how we can win the information war while the media tries to undermine us at every turn. During the first and second world wars, the goverment controlled the message by censoring the message being put out by the media. While I have serious reservations about censorship, I wonder if we can prevail without some control of the message. I am not trying to advocate censorship, but I am posing the question.
I also think that a far more fundamental problem that the article didn’t discuss may be a highly polarized political culture in which each side puts partisan oneupsmanship over national security interests in a time of war. I worry about whether we can win the long war abroad when the biggest battle is here at home.
Tim P—I don’t think censorship would work because the problem isn’t entirely that the press reports things we don’t want them to. They also fail to report things we want them to.
Look at Abu Ghraib. When they turned it into a feeding frenzy, it was literally old news. It had been mentioned multiple times in daily briefings; the Pentagon had kept the press advised of the existence and progress of the investigation.
Then there’s US military successes, the heroism of our troops, and the perfidy of our enemy. The press utterly ignores all that, while focusing on set-backs and the “successes” of our enemies.
Censorship can’t force the press to report something, and that’s more than half the problem we’re facing. It also can’t keep them from putting a negative spin on things, such as economic news.
I think the press reports whatever the administration wants it to, Rob.
The problem is the administration is so bad at propaganda.
Take the Iranians that were recently seized by our troops.
The administration wants us to believe that they were working with the insurgency, but they were “captured” in the supposedly insurgency-free Kurdish area of Iraq and the Kurds are now defending them.
So it looks like in an effort to stir up anti-Iranian sentiment, the administration has undermined the idea that the Kurds are our allies and the Kurdish area of Iraq is stable.
Like, for instance, theSWIFT leaks, the NSA wiretap misframings, anti-Bush screeds over a hurricane, attacks on a thriving economy, etc.,—these are all part of Bushcofascism, which has raped the Constitution, buggered the Bill of Rights, and done unspeakable things to Besty Ross (if only metaphorically), and are now behind even the negative press reportage about it.
So it goes in the “reality-based” community, where no conspiracy theory is too outrageous to be seriously floated by adult humans who have clearly lost their fucking minds.
So the press prints negative stories about the administration, too.
I don’t see why that’s a problem.
Actus is dead! Long live Actus!
[Jesus wept.]
I don’t see why you would, given your brief history here of proving impervious to the dictates of logic.
Shorter alphie: “LALALALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU THE PRESS IS CLEARLY RIGHT-WING BIASED LALALALALALA”
I used to get a little bent at comments like alphie’s.
Now I just think to myself, “My heavens, what an interesting social and psychological phenomenon this person isâ€Â.
Let’s examine the recent report that America attacked some bad guys in Somalia.
Right or Left wing bias there?
Or just reporting what they were told?
Sure alphie – when they report “ X number of civilians killed” with absolutely no verification and nothing other than a single “elder’s” word – oddly enough we don’t know if he is an IC supporter or not.
We get selected quotes from people who say how nobody wants the TG or the Ethiopians there and they mourn the passing of the IC and “stability”…
The western media has little to no presence in Somalia at the moment, which is instructive on more than one level.
As for the press reporting what they are told, alphie has obviously never seen the reports from Iraq routinely issued by DoD and just as routinely ignored by the MSM.
I thank everyone who had kind words for them. Some of the commenters raise interesting points that I put beyond the scope of the post, ‘cause it was a wee bit long as it was!
So what’s the breakdown on the Somalia story?
Reporting we attacked some bad guys – right-wing bias?
Reporting the administration says we missed – neutral?
Reporting we actually tagged a bunch of civilians – left-wing bias?
Which averages out to neutral.
I know what the breakdown on Somalia is not:
Pretty safe to say that didn’t happen here.
No alphie, it averages out to a bunch of nothing, which is the approximate amount of attention the MSM has given, comparatively, to the recent happenings in Somalia. You see, they’re confused. There are so many brown people that it’s tough for them to decide which ones are authentically brown enough to rate the superior moral authority. So they don’t really take sides.
I didn’t say the press doesn’t report what the administration doesn’t want it to report, Karl.
Subtle difference.
Neutral, alphie, isn’t reporting what one side says, and then giving a rebuttal to the other. That’s sophmoric. Neutral is listening to both sides and saying to one “You’re wrong, he’s right.” So what is neutral about reporting and hyping every little misstep from the United States and its allies, but not reporting or giving a downplay to the atrocities committed by its enemies?
What’s neutral about that? That isn’t the definition of neutrality, that’s partisanship, that’s choosing sides. And why you would want to choose taking the side of the Islamofascists after seeing – not listening to them, seeing – what they do is a bloody mystery.
Well, no, not really a mystery. I just don’t want to turn to the final chapter, hm?
Are you saying every time Bush makes the ludicrous claim that his tax cuts have actually boosted tax revenue, the press should just print the fact that Bush lied again, Mikey?
http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-years-plea.html
Or should the press only judge claims made by people who aren’t in the administration?
alphie,
If you think that the press has reported whatever the Administration wanted about successful missions in Iraq, Iraqi reconstruction projects and the heroism of our troops, you really need to cut down on the hallucinogens.
For that matter, it took the LA Times weeks to sort of acknowledge the military’s denial of an airstrike in Ramadi.
And in the Burning Six story, the AP has never reported the military’s denial that four mosques were burned.
Now I see you are trying to change the subject a third time, to tax cuts.
It is a true troll who tries to derail conversation because he has nothing to say about the topic at hand.
Winning the support of civilians in the countries our troops are fighting in is not the same thing as the domestic battle over the war, Karl.
You seem to be trying to conflate the two.
A story in the L.A. Times or on NBC is not going to influence the opinions of people who are actually living in Iraq.
They have firsthand knowledge of how things are going there.
hmmm, they sure seemed to go nuts over a story from Newsweek about a Koran being flushed down the toilet. I wonder how that happened?
alphie, I really don’t have time to deal with your level of ignorance tonight. Nor the patience, either. And no matter what I say, you’ll pull out some anecdote, like a twelv-year-old and yell “See? See?”
Suffice to say, tax cuts, boosted the economy, a rising economy lead to increased business activity, which lead to increased profits and wages, which are taxed, resulting in higher tax revenues.
Please consult a non-Marxist economist; you’re an economic illiterate and boring as heck.
TW: thinking99. What 86 did.
If he weren’t old enough to vote, this would actually be cute.
Meet Pamela Hess, alphie. She’s got a little clue for you.
What happens if we pull out from Iraq now, Pablo?
Same thing that will happen if we pull out 10 years from now.
Iraq will be dominated by the Shiites who are friendly with Iran.
What did we expect to happen after we invaded a country that’s 60% Shiite?
Maggie just pwned you, but I’ll add that you’re moving your goalposts again. And revealing a total ignorance of the topic of the post to boot. But as a troll only seeks to disrupt, reading the actual post and the links in them isn’t necessary. I get that.
Based on what, alphie? You got a crystal ball, buddy? Do you think the rest of the neighborhood is going to let that happen? Are you sure?
How do you feel about blood, alphie? And what do you think your scenario holds in store for American national security?
Does that cross your mind at all?
You only touched on the propaganda aspect of counter-insurgency, Karl.
You left out the forced internment of civlian populations and targeted assassinations of people we don’t like.
You also left out the fact that counter-insugencies are rarely successful, as we have seen in Iraq over the past four years.
Again demonstrating that he didn’t bother to read the underlying Packer article. Or didn’t understand it. Or is just trolling, not caring whether he’s demonstrating his ignorance.
President Bush has managed to divide and conquer the Middle East.
But if we can’t even pry alphie away from tacitly supporting the insurgents, how can we pry the Iraqi moderates away from the insurgent line?
Alphie inadvertantly made Karl’s point.
It’s not a matter of class31 it’s a matter of knowing which side your felafel is buttered on.
I get my New Yorker in the mail every week, Karl.
I read Packer’s underlying article on the potty weeks ago.
Interesting stuff, but I think it’s too little, too late.
You only get so many Muliigans in war.
It’s not America’s job to counter the Islamist’s propaganda…it’s the job of the people who don’t want them running their country to do that.
And spare me the tired idea that the Islamists can somehow conquer America…they can’t.
I wrote:
Based on alphie’s response, we can conclude it’s (2) with a heavy dose of (3). And a dash of isolationism.
Of course, 20 Islamists who disagreed with alphie managed to kill thousands in a single morning. And if others like them get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they won’t hesitate to use them.
But I’ll spare alphie the effort of responding:
Of that’s sooooooooooo 2001.
First we don’t print cartoons of Mohammed because “it’s offensive” and we’re scared.
Then we allow Muslim Elders to decide cases of family law in Dearborn, MI
We allow Muslims to refuse to carry people carrying alcohol in their taxis; next it’s jews.
We allow Muslims to mediate cases of law based on Shari’a for their community.
Police quit policing those communities out of ‘sensitivity’ and fear.
We curb sales of pork and beer and censor magazines based on Muslim ‘sensitivities’.
Shari’a law is enforced in entire cities based on ‘sensitivity’ to the Muslim community.
Women not wearing veils are attacked.
Soon we change our laws, foreign policy and elect leaders not offensive to the Muslims in our society….
I’ll bet you don’t even find anything on my list above worth fighting against.
Puh-LEEZ, guys! Everybody who’s intellectually honest knows that Rethuglicans are the REAL enemies of American values.
They can attack us, Karl.
But they can’t conquer us.
The Islamist’s main propaganda point is that America is trying to colonize Muslim countries.
It’s kinda hard to counter that as long as America has troops stationed in Muslim countries against the will of a majority of their populations and a majority of Americans, too.
From my original post:
Thereby proving my earlier point about trolls not reading things.
But if you want to believe that appeasing the Islamists will pacify them, go right ahead.
Kinda hard to appease people who are dead, Karl.
Kinda hard to avenge ourselves on them, too.
But that hasn’t stopped Bush from trying these past five years.
…which is where the article comes in, had you understood it.
But they can’t conquer us.
And I’m sure there are some Parisians sitting in a little outdoor cafe in the Latin Quarter, sipping a nice 1992 Bruno Michel Cuvee Millesimee
saying the same thing while studiously ignoring those huge sections of the city they can no longer visit (and wondering how long they’ll actually be able to drink wine in the city at all).
“those huge sections of the city they can no longer visit”
Which sections are those, Darleen?
Please list the sections of Paris people can’t visit for us.
First we don’t print cartoons of Mohammed because “it’s offensive†and we’re scared.
Then we allow Muslim Elders to decide cases of family law in Dearborn, MI
We allow Muslims to refuse to carry people carrying alcohol in their taxis; next it’s jews.
We allow Muslims to mediate cases of law based on Shari’a for their community.
Police quit policing those communities out of ‘sensitivity’ and fear.
We curb sales of pork and beer and censor magazines based on Muslim ‘sensitivities’.
Shari’a law is enforced in entire cities based on ‘sensitivity’ to the Muslim community.
Women not wearing veils are attacked.
Soon we change our laws, foreign policy and elect leaders not offensive to the Muslims in our society….
I’ll bet you don’t even find anything on my list above worth fighting against.
C’mon alphie–any answer to this?
He don’t have to be conquered if we capitulate to cultural totalitarianism.
I guess you won’t mind growing a beard and not eating during daylight hours during Ramadan. You’re sensitive to the plight of the oppressed Muslims….
I’ll save Darleen the trouble. Here’s a list of 751 such locations.
alphie,
People have been patient with you but you don’t seem capable of keeping up with or staying focused on the thread, much less current events. Please keep spouting your nonsense and publishing it on your blog. I’m certain you are impressing the right people.
A couple of questions:
Can we hear your thoughts on global warmining now?
Do you have a brother that goes by the handle “monkeyboy”? Your level of imbecility is bound to be genetic.
Those are economic development zones, Karl.
Who told you they were “no go” zones?
I’m sure it was an unbiased source.
…and in case anyone felt alphie was worth dealing with, alphie provides proof that he is now.
Alphie, It’s from the French Government, ass.
“Economic Development Zone” is a euphemism like “persons of asian descent”. It’s not like the French Gov is going to call them “unpoliced zones of Muslim territory”.
But really, what’s a few raped unveiled women or a couple of knifed artists; and who really likes pork or dogs?
You’ve been meaning to grow a beard and stop drinking beer and smoking dope anyhow.
And the progressive women you hang out with would look hot in an abaya.
You don’t really know anything about this kind of thing, do you?
I think you’re a Muslim plant63 waging your own information warfare, or you’re just dumb….
Gray,
Karl’s list only has a few Parisian “no go” districts and they contain the University of Paris, several 4 star hotels and quite a few churches.
I sure their patrons would be quite surprised to learn they were visiting a “no go” zone.
Much like South-Cenral L.A. is an Enterprise Zone.
To Darleen’s list we can add RFI and l’Humanite, but even Newsweek reported there were at least 150 no-go zones before the last round of riots.
Would tourists in Paris be surprised to learn they were in a “no-go” zone? I’m sure they would. Which would be a good reason to call them “sensitive zones.”
they contain the University of Paris,
alpee, are you aware of the neighborhood surrounding the University of Southern California?
Yeah, you gotta be careful around the U of Chicago, too.
But alphie’s going to set us all right, because he knows much more about counter-insurgency than people like Kilcullen, and much more about French no-go zones than a French Criminologist who has been studying it for more than a decade.
He might consider running for office.
Karl, you don’t get it. “no-go” means NOBODY GOES THERE! EVAR! duh!
oooooh, and Fair Park area here in Dallas comes to mind. going there during the State Fair is okay, the rest of the year? not such a great idea.
alphie should go to Paris to find the no go areas.
Chickenfrenchman!
Must admit I was taken aback by GW’s interview tonight on 60 Minutes. He actually seemed to speak for himself, and even accept responsibility for his hard-headed decisions. I disagree with him overall, but I dislike the guy a bit less.
Even shorter alphie: “If I don’t say it happened/is true, it didn’t/isn’t!”
You also left out the fact that counter-insugencies are rarely successful, as we have seen in Iraq over the past four years.
Now you’re just making stuff up.
well, and when taking this into account:
I would think that it’s a might early to be calling it a failure.