Military Propaganda
The April 10, 2006 Washington Post reported that the US Military has been magnifying the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer. "The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey.
Besides the dishonest attempt to mislead the American public, you wonder how our strategy is effected by these efforts. Do we ignore the real threat while concentrating on the one that furthers the Administration’s need for justification of its actions? The entire administration of the Iraq war has been promulgated on the use of erroneous information and driven by the desire to see what it erroneously believed rather than by what is real.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer. "The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey.
Besides the dishonest attempt to mislead the American public, you wonder how our strategy is effected by these efforts. Do we ignore the real threat while concentrating on the one that furthers the Administration’s need for justification of its actions? The entire administration of the Iraq war has been promulgated on the use of erroneous information and driven by the desire to see what it erroneously believed rather than by what is real.
posted by John Weiss at 11:43 AM
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