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Point the finger of blame where it belongs It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.
Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore.
Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy’s views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.
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I think the latest attacks by the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore shows that what they fear most, well above the infidels, is normal, sane, previously downtrodden iraqis getting into a position of power (and also shows that the right people are joining the new security forces).
You can get public support by blowing up the ‘invading westerners’, killing your fellow muslims as they try to join a police force is going to take some explaining away. Especially since the american army is in the next street.
Once we and our camaras depart iraq, the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore may well find itself diminishing rapidly in numbers.
I’m looking forward to us pulling out of Iraq, just because it will screw up all the propaganda that has been fed to the people for so long. “so the hated americans came to slaughter all the muslim world, like we were told, but they just kicked out saddam’s mob, put an elected government in place then buggered off again? WTF?”
Unfortunately the US Occupation Government has been _hopeless_ at PR so far, why should they start being useful now?
On the other hand this seems so blatantly stupid bombing that perhaps quasi silence is just as effective.
Let people come to their own conclusion who the morons are. The americans, who show every evidence of wanting to leave (once some order has been restored), and who by and large don’t go about slaughtering the locals gratuitously and seem to helping (if incompetently), and the insurgents who seem to have lost the plot altogether.
I’m puzzled as to why these bombings are considered remarkable. Resistance forces in occupied countries always attack collaborators. It’s been that way throughout history.
Yes. In fact, the bombings by Iraqi “resistance forces” are all the more unremarkable when you consider that these good people were torturing and murdering their fellow citizens when they were, themselves, in power. I guess they just enjoy the work.
It is not as simple as the bad guys (Baathists/Al Qaeda) against the good guys (the rest). It is much more complicated. It’s a struggle between clans, tribes, sects, religions and ethnic groups. A struggle for power in Iraq. These struggles are traditionally fierce and brutal in this part of the world. It stops when some group gains enough power to dominate the rest and imposes some semblance of peace by efficiently eliminating it’s rivals.
Don’t expect much quiet there in the foreseable future.
Actually, one of the bloggers on our group blog (Sasha the Blogatrice) is an officer in the CPA. He talks about the publicity problem quite a bit. A big part of the problem is that the mass media presence there doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know. They are a deadly combination of lazy, stupid, and pretty much anti- U.S.
And just so you don’t feel too bad, the Al Zaqwiri memo decrying the lack of Iraqi enthusiasm for the Al Qaida driven uprising was spun on CNN as “Report: Iraqis Want al-Qaida to Drive U.S. Out”.
As I age, I become more and more convinced of the existence of God, heaven and hell. Correspondingly, I become more convinced that there is a special place in hell for dishonest mass media journalists, where we can force them to eat shovel fulls of shite, just as they’ve done to us for all these years…
The Iraqis know. Read IRAQ THE MODEL, http://healingiraq.com/
These Iraqi bloggers are really good. It would be very sad if Bush lost the election, or the Iraqi election got hijacked by the mullahs
Excerpt:
“The last horrible attacks were very saddening and proved how afraid those evil leaders are from the ongoing changes in Iraq, never the less when I went down to the streets and despite almost everyone knew about these attacks at least hours ago, the traffic was busy as usual, the traffic police, the IP and the new Iraq army soldiers were all in their places doing their jobs as if nothing has happened, and the reason that I don’t believe this is attributed to apathy is that when the same terrorists made a threatening announcement through Al-Jazeera about 2 months ago, asking the Iraqis to go on strike for 3 days and warning those who disobey that they will face horrible consequences, the next day the streets in Baghdad were nearly empty. This is not the case anymore, and it made me surer than ever that we are winning and they will lose because they can’t kill us all nor can they force us to quit our jobs and take a safe corner in our homes”
The estimable Wretchard at Belmont Club pulls the key detail out of this episode. The Iraqi police, while fully engaged with the terrorists at one location, were offered help by the nearby 82nd Airborne. They declined the help, asking only for more ammo.
My kind of guys. I think they’ll do just fine.