In response to my earlier post on propaganda, counter-propaganda, and the shifting of the propaganda paradigm, I received the following email (reprinted with permission, though I’ve taken out the writer’s name):
Regarding your recent blog post, “Fa-llujah Daddy”, I must say that you are dead-on when discussing how US news and commentary impacts information operations in Iraq.
I’m an Army Reserve soldier. My last deployment to Iraq was in 2006-2007 as a Psychological Operations Detachment NCOIC. A key task of our detachment was conducting counter-propaganda in Baghdad. The sheer amount of rumors, disinformation, and enemy propaganda being pumped out on the street level made this task Sisyphean.
Now, I’d be the first to tell you that ‘atmospherics’ gathered by small teams of roving soldiers are not scientific and should be taken for what they’re worth, but I have repeatedly come across US products that were repackaged by insurgent groups with the intent of using the authority of the source as well as its content to influence local national target audiences in support of enemy objectives. What’s amazing is how little the content is modified IOT meet the intent of insurgent IO cells.
The best example I can recall: one of my guys came across a print “poster” that was simply this news story reprinted in Arabic.
Because none of us had the time or inclination to read The Guardian every day, this was the first we’d heard of this story. Obviously our enemies were a bit more widely read than us…
Since we re-deployed this spring, I can only imagine how the national debate is getting repackaged and disseminated over there.Of course, during my deployment in 2003 I first learned that Arnold had been elected Governor of California by a gaggle of Iraqi kids pantomiming “muscle men†stances while we were on patrol, so it’s not all bad news that’s making it over there.
As I’ve written before, it seems to me a rather uncontroversial empirical truth that what our politicians say — and what the western media writes — will both make their way to Iraq, where these stories and pronouncements can be used for any number of purposes, not the least of which, unfortunately, is to bolster the resolve of the enemy and weaken the resolve of Iraqis (or, at least, compel them to make pragmatic choices based on the uncertainty of the US commitment).
— Which, I’ll note, would be entirely beside the point, as far as I’m concerned, were I convinced that the criticisms by anti-war types and the editorial choices of the mainstream press were being offered both in good faith AND with a degree of due dilligence.
But I don’t believe they are — and so I find the push to lionize the structure of dissent-as-patriotism by those cynically inclined to use such a structure to cover their own cynicism, both dishonest and opportunistic.
Instead, we have cynical politicians vying for control of the war narrative, and a press that seems, if not outright hostile to the Administration, at the very least uninformed, unreliable, and unencumbered by the kind of self-awareness that would force them to take a close look at their own credulity and confirmation bias.
Of course, this email does come to me from a Psyops guy, so there’s always the chance that I’m being used as a cog in the continuing propaganda efforts of our nefarious military industrial complex — the goal being to foist off blame for a lost war on mythical media bias, and at the expense of the brave dissent of those who, you know, simply dig peace more than you.
In which case, stick a feather in my cap and call it macaroni. Or Franklin Foer. Your choice.
” …I first learned that Arnold had been elected Governor of California by a gaggle of Iraqi kids pantomiming “muscle men†stances while we were on patrol, so it’s not all bad news that’s making it over there.”
It may not be bad news, but it certainly isn’t good news.
(smartalek mode off)
Well said, well said indeed.
Given the information available, would it be reasonable to believe that they are not acting in good faith, and could not give a fuck about due diligence?
Web Reconnaissance for 09/07/2007…
A short recon of whatÂ’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often….
Given the minority status of their opinions, it’s the soldiers/Bush/chickenhawks/etc. who are in the patriotic-dissent relationship to elite consensus. Always fun to point that out.
On the other hand…
Because none of us had the time or inclination to read The Guardian every day, this was the first we’d heard of this story.
U.S. psyops, at least at the strategic level, is rightly regarded as blind-bat incompetent. The guys on the ground are trying, but…
Propaganda is easy. Speak in a way that agitates group identification (because of the Darwin), and know that lies do this better than facts (because of the Freud). “Counter” propaganda — in the form of vision-righting “balance” or debunking — is useless. Propaganda is not information (or “memes”). If you treat it like it is, you lose.
Is Foer fired? No. Is The New Republic going out of business? No. They couldn’t be more debunked than they are, yet his masters, cronies (across the print press, “ideology” regardless), and the TNR audience, knowing this, are unmoved. They’re only more angry at you. And that was always the point — whether anyone making it knew it or not.
Another (ironic) exapmle:
Has the Dawkins religion-as-meme antitheistic info-war made anyone an atheist? No. It’s only made some atheists speak more arrogantly, and made religious people pissed and arrogant re: them and Dawkins — and re: atheists who have nothing to do with him or them except that they’re not religious (and, in turn, it’s made me find religious people really annoying for the first time ever.) Is this the result that Dawkins wanted? Maybe. If he’s a secret Leninist. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s how it works anyway.
…
Are you getting what I’m driving at here?
…
Bah!
Beer doesn’t care, either. /pubward
But it didn’t begin that way, which is the important thing. Instead, I find it fun to point out that what began as an anti-establishment position (which, let’s face it, that’s its draw for most of these folks), is in fact the new orthodoxy, supported in all its glorious vapidity by the new bourgeois.
Ric Caric is the Man.
As for the rest, yeah, I get what you’re driving at. And yet I keep at it anyway. In my own way, I’m more prideful and ridiculous than those who know that lying is the best bet — and in the fatalistic rhetorical universe, it isn’t God who is dead, it’s idealism based around anything other than self-interest.
So I guess I’ll call it a day and have myself a Kit Kat bar.
Make sure you brush after.
Make sure you brush after.
your moustache, that is.
Fooled you again, SUCKERS !!!! LOL
– So for the 1 Millionth time we see close up and personal how easy it is for the Siditionists within to attack our Republic, using our own open society against us, and parlaying with our enemies from without. Pity the fools who have such high delusions of hope to bring us down that they continue to miss the whole point of said open society. The Bastiches can sedish all they want. In the end they will be just as dead.
I like your Dawkins example.
Except I think Dawkins has made it more hip, more intellectual if you will, to be atheist…. and of course the associated arrogant pomposity inevitably follows.
Religion has always had it’s fill of pompous blowhards… one of the foundational pillars of Jesus’ ministry was tormenting Pharisees. Always a fat target; they consistently rose to the occaision “healed on the Sabbath? Blasphemy!” (Sounds like radical Islam by the way)
Let’s work it another way and to do it I’d ask a question:
Do you think that numbers of gays and lesbians have increased percentagewise in the last 50 years in the USA?
If so,
Is that the result of social conditioning or has the social and cultural climate changed to a point where people feel comfortable coming out?
Here is another:
Without the 9/11 truther videos, documentaries, books and their enablers in the media and universities… would we see such a large percentage of Democrats believing horseshit?
I think propaganda works. And I think that The US military should read every rag from Boulder to al Jazeera HQ
I’d answer both.
[…] Western Media Stories Morph into Enemy Propaganda. “What the western media writes  will make their [sic] way to Iraq, where these stories and pronouncements can be used for any number of purposes, not the least of which, unfortunately, is to bolster the resolve of the enemy and weaken the resolve of Iraqis” (Protein Wisdom, 9/7) […]