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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (26084)	4/15/2004 12:22:28 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 93284

Coalition Loses the 'Psy-Ops' Advantage in Iraq Progress simply isn't registering, and the U.S. is partly to blame. As the current symphony of violence reached its grotesque crescendo in Iraq last week, I happened to be in Paris attending a NATO conference on psychological warfare. This somehow seemed appropriate because it is in the realm of "psy-ops" that the coalition is suffering its biggest setbacks. I don't mean to underestimate the sheer physical challenge confronting 160,000 allied troops in controlling a country of more than 22 million people. But from a purely military perspective, nothing that has happened in the last two weeks poses an insurmountable obstacle. Rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr seems to have ample money and firearms, probably supplied by Iran, but he has no more than 6,000 ill-trained fighters in his Al Mahdi militia. Most Shiites scorn him as a parvenu. The Sunni terrorists in Fallouja, many of them former soldiers and members of the secret police, are a more formidable bunch, but they too are nothing that a few thousand Marines can't handle. In fact, there may be a tactical advantage to tackling the Mahdists and other menaces now, instead of leaving them to a ramshackle future Iraqi government to deal with. But whatever progress coalition forces are making — and they do seem to be succeeding after some initial setbacks — it isn't registering with most people around the world. I have in front of me newspapers from the last few days gathered while traveling in Europe. London's Sunday Telegraph features a gruesome photo of a dead German lying in a pool of blood near a masked Iraqi fighter holding a sniper rifle. Its competitor, the Sunday Times, has a cheerful front page: "Apocalypse Now?" (At least there's a question mark.) Tune in to CNN or the BBC, and it's no better. You see pictures of blindfolded Japanese hostages and wounded Marines. And that's only the English-language media. The coverage is far more scathing on Arabic TV channels Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, which falsely claim that U.S. forces are deliberately targeting civilians. All of these images matter because any guerrilla war is, above all, a battle for hearts and minds. No guerrilla force can hope to defeat a well-trained regular army in the field. Its objective is simply to inflict so much punishment that forces will be withdrawn. Iraqi fighters seem to have an instinctive understanding of the psychological aspect of this struggle. They are replaying the very images that forced the U.S. out of previous conflicts. Their hostage-taking recalls Lebanon in the 1980s; their abuse of corpses recalls Somalia in the 1990s. As President Bush indicated in his press conference Tuesday, such atrocities won't sap U.S. will in the short run. They might only increase the determination of a nation still smarting from the agony of 9/11. But our enemies are enjoying more success in terrorizing less-committed coalition partners, relief organizations, potential investors and the U.N. Many of them have either left Iraq or are on the verge of doing so. The terrorists' most spectacular coup was the bombing in Madrid that helped elect a Socialist government committed to pulling Spanish troops out of Iraq. (Too bad that didn't stop the jihadis from plotting fresh bombings in Spain.) The coalition showed its own flair for psy-ops during the conventional war last year. Embedding reporters with allied troops was a stroke of genius that dispelled the ludicrous distortions of Saddam Hussein's misinformation minister. But the coalition has shown less skill in countering enemy propaganda of late. To give only one example: Why is it that the daily press briefings in Baghdad are conducted by two Americans, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt and Dan Senor, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority? Even when an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant for Sadr, it was announced by Kimmitt and Senor. This gives the rebels exactly what they want by furthering the impression that they are fighting against a U.S. occupation rather than an emerging democracy with broad international support. Why not put an Iraqi face on current operations by having Iraqi officials brief reporters? Or, to emphasize the international nature of the occupation, why not have a British, Polish or Italian briefer? This is a small thing, to be sure, but it is indicative of the ham-handedness with which the coalition has approached the hearts-and-minds campaign. Vietnam ought to serve as a potent reminder that the U.S. can win every battle on the ground but still lose the war unless it retains "information dominance." Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. CC

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (26084)	4/16/2004 5:55:46 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

If you have sufficient faith in God I had a lot of problem with that, even as a child, for I could never understand HOW and WHY so many seemingly rational people believe in something they have never seen. Something nobody that is remotely credible to them has ever seen. Something never proven. Oh you get the picture :-) I has always felt like a delusion en masse to me, you know, like the Dark Ages belief in the existence of witches... which, I can tell you, did not make my life easier growing up in the ME :-) Well, that's just God talking through YOU Really. Is that why it sounds like gibberish? :-) How's he [Neal Stephenson] compare to Gibson? Aah. One of my favourite subjects. I will try to keep myself from launching into a mile-long monologue :-) Suffice it to say that Gibson is to be appreciated from the way he changed the course of science-fiction from space ships to Mars and wars with green spacemen to internet, virtual reality etc. He did, after all, invent the term "cyberspace" and used it for the first time in Neuromancer in 1980s, before there even was "www" website addresses. However... I read all his books, and they give you a taste for what that particular future will FEEL like, but the stories are just not interesting. They go nowhere. You read and read and are sometimes intrigued about the virtual personality that lives in the machine or the idea of being a data courier with a stack of storage in your brain, but they are not very interesting books overall. Enter Stephenson... His vision of the future is not much different from that of Gibson (darkish, corporations openly running the world, etc) but he has a story to tell. A very interesting one. In Snow Crash for example, the story takes you from a drug that apparently makes the brain of the user "crash", even when "seen" in virtuality as a picture, to ancient Sumerian legends (ex: tower of Babel), and a way to "hack the brain". He has invented a story so detailed, so consistent with the little archeological details (some of which he shows with diagrams), and so overall brilliant that he has by far passed Gibson. And that was before he wrote Cryptonomicon, which I can only compare with Foucault's Pendulum in the mix of intellectual pleasure and sheer pain of difficulty of reading :-) There, the story runs on two levels - on one, there is a guy who works to decypher Germans' Enigma code during WWII and meanwhile invents the first magnetic computer, and on another, there is his grandson, a computer hacker in today's world, building a data haven on some island principality, kind of like Switzerland is a money haven... I will shut up now :-)