Not too long after 9/11 I was working in London. Come to think of it, it was less than two weeks after the attacks. Anyway, following the war from overseas had its advantages and its frustrations, but most of all it left me free to follow the events without having to wade through American-style bottle-blonde bimbo-babble and hairy-chested talking heads striking manly poses and all the other ignorant shit that passes for news in this country (there's a reason why CNN International is more substantive than plain ol' CNN: other people won't eat this crap).
One Brit reporter, who'd lived and worked in the US for many years, made a comment early on that's always stuck with me, even though his name did not. He said that what most Europeans didn't understand was that in the Bush administration the terrorists had found an adversary that was just as hamstrung by their fundamentalist worldview as themselves.
He predicted that these two myopic combatants were going to bash away at each other while the rest of the world looked on in horror. It wasn't a "clash of civilizations" at all. It's a single anti-modernism, screaming at the inverted image in the mirror. Both are proud of having rejected civilization.
He was right.
But the evidence that he was right never ceases to amaze, in the same way that every car wreck looks basically the same but we always slow down to look anyway.
What kind of civilization are we building?
What kind of civilization is our enemy building?
The ICG will release a report on Wednesday called "In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency." It is, the group believes, the first comprehensive look at the way the insurgency uses the Internet and information the group says we ignore at our own peril.
"What the insurgency is about is not a mystery," said Malley. "It's not a puzzle. They're not hiding it. They're broadcasting it. Let's try to understand it politically, rather than simply have [our] own preconceptions and dismiss it as propaganda."
Unfortunately, our "leaders" see their point of view as a kind of entitlement. Being able to see things from another's point of view, even if it's to know your enemy, is seen as a weakness. People who can do this are held in suspicion. They are "liberals."
The enemy is whoever the leader needs the enemy to be in order to perform the leader's cartoon notion of his role. That is enough. There is nothing to know. Learning, after all, takes work. Believing is cheap and easy, requiring nothing of the believer.
Propaganda or not, the communications by insurgent groups have advanced far beyond distributing leaflets at mosques.
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ICG says these groups have monthly magazines, professionally designed PDF files that are distributed via e-mail.
They use what we in the United States might call "synergy," providing information and links to relatively sophisticated movies -- like one mythologizing the so-called Baghdad Sniper who claims to have killed more than 140 U.S. troops.
"It gives the impression that the Iraqi insurgency can kill Americans wherever they are," said Peter Harling, an ICG senior analyst.
The ICG says that these productions not only bolster the insurgency's confidence and image, but also help recruit new fighters for the cause with biographies of suicide bombers and movies that document terrorist operations.
Those are messages essential to any propaganda effort. They have their equivalents, for instance, in our own "news." But the insurgents' message reflects their particular values and beliefs, leading to content that you would not expect if you were a stranger to the enemy's culture:
Harling described one such movie. "[The insurgents] all embrace," he said. "And then [one] explains the device in the car and how he will set the explosives off. Then you see footage of what is presented as the operation itself."
Harling added: "The whole idea here is to show that although he exploded himself, his body is more or less intact."
The notion of a suicide bomber's body emerging unscathed is an important religious enticement, the group says.
"Not only do you go to paradise," said Harling, "but your body remains intact. It doesn't rot for days."
An intelligent leadership would see an opportunity in this macabre fixation on the integrity of the body and exploit it. But that would take effort. It would require that we step out of our box and into theirs and frankly, victory isn't worth all that. Not to our leadership. The enemy has their myths, our "leaders" have corners to turn, throes to be final, a fictional enemy that will respond to "bring it on" with quaking fear, etc. These two somnabulant butchers slash away at each other in the dark. It is a battle to the death between invertebrates.
The danger of propaganda is that if you repeat it often enough, you may come to believe it. Ultimately, your propaganda can leave you blind. Consider this:
In the United States, many tend to think of insurgents as so cruel, they are impervious to criticism. That is not quite right.
Even the most ruthless of the groups, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organization -- responsible for most of the beheadings -- has stopped broadcasting that barbarism on the Internet.
"There used to be on the Internet a lot of illustrations of beheadings," said Malley. "That caused, from all accounts, revulsion on the part of Iraqis -- even Iraqis who might have been sympathetic with the objectives of the insurgency. You don't see them anymore."
Outside of wingnut websites, you mean. They love themselves a good beheadin'. They need the brutality of beheadings just like Bush needs the terrorists' terror to justify his every un-American move. These two sets of freaks need each other. The rest of the world doesn't. For this reason, Bush's pursuit of his own fantasies has only fed those of the enemy.
And the facts aren't on our side, either, so we can't pound those:
"Propaganda is certainly having an effect, but the effect is not the dominant one," said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on military affairs and the Middle East, and an ABC News consultant. "The lack so far of any kind of inclusive government, massive unemployment in Sunni areas -- sometimes 40 percent or more -- these are the factors which may be driving the number of sympathizers and participants in the insurgency -- not propaganda."
Ultimately many experts worry the information war -- like the ground war -- is one the United States cannot win on its own.
You see, in this country the Republicans can pound the table,
since the facts aren't on their side. Unfortunately, the enemy doesn't live in the same mental trailer-park as the Republicans' constituents. There's no convenient mythology that they can use to hide all the bodies. Outside the nurturing environment of a Republican-owned press and a docile public, the failed policies of the Republicans are a harder sell.
Jim Lobe's take on the same report is defintely worth a read.
While much of the rhetoric is propagandistic, according to the ICG, it also provides a "window into the insurgency" capable of informing the analyst about its internal debates, levels of coordination, its perceptions of both the enemy and its constituency, and changes in tactics and strategy.
Such a textual analysis, according to the ICG, yields conclusions that are substantially at odds with many of Washington's current, as well as past, assumptions about the insurgency. Indeed, "In Iraq, the US fights an enemy it hardly knows," the report asserts.
The fact that information is propaganda does not make it useless, it makes it useful, if your goal is defeating the enemy who produced the propaganda. You have right in front of you the things they value, how they want people to think about them, etc. They're showing their hand. IF you have the sense to read it:
The notion, for example, that the insurgency is divided between Iraqi nationalists and foreign jihadis, most prominently al-Qaeda's Organization in Mesopotamia (QOM), led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, appears increasingly questionable, according to the report, which notes that there has been a "gradual convergence" in the groups' tactics and rhetoric.
"A year ago, groups appeared divided over practices and ideology, but most debates have been settled through convergence around Sunni Islamic jurisprudence and Sunni Arab grievances," according to the report.
"Practically speaking, it has become virtually impossible to categorize a particular group's discourse as jihadi as opposed to nationalist or patriotic, with the exception of the Ba'ath Party, whose presence on the ground has been singularly ineffective."
Then again, I have to evaluate this apparent error or oversight of the administration in the light of the possibility that the way the administration talks about things reflects simultaneously their own propaganda and their failure to know their enemy:
In that connection, "recent reports of negotiations between 'nationalist' groups and the US over forming an alliance against foreign jihadis appear at the very least exaggerated", according to the report. It noted that any such "duplicity" would almost certainly have been exposed and denounced by others.
Moreover, "no armed group so far has even hinted" that it may be willing to negotiate with the US and Iraqi authorities. "While covert talks cannot be excluded, the publicly accessible discourse remains uniformly and relentlessly hostile to the occupation and its 'collaborators'."
This would explain why we've heard whisperings about the US negotiating with insurgents almost as often and for as long as we've been hearing about "turning corners" and "last throes." These mantras reflect an idiot's constant hopes, placed in failed policy.
For future reference, note the names and descriptions of these four groups. They may help you make sense out of the gibberish coming out of Iraq. You'll note that they're not exactly household names in a country that pretends to care what's going on in Iraq.
According to the report, four main groups now dominate the communications channels of the insurgency and publish regularly through a variety of media: QOM; Partisans of the Sunna Army (Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna); the Islamic Army in Iraq (al-Jaysh al-Islami fil-'Iraq); and the Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance (al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Muqawama al-'Iraqiya, or Jami).
QOM, whose operational importance has, according to the ICG, been exaggerated by US officials, sought during the past year to "Iraqify" its image, in part by reportedly replacing Zarqawi, a Jordanian, with an Iraqi leader. Jami, according to some ICG sources, may be a "public relations organ" shared by different armed groups and tends to be somewhat more sophisticated and nationalistic in its rhetoric and communications strategy than the others.
You should note them because they may very well be at the negotiating table in a couple of years. A few years after that, they'll be in Iraqi schools' history text books, filed under "patriots."
Here's how they see their situation, according to the report:
All groups appear to have become more confident over the past year, according to the report, which noted that their optimism is not only noticeable in their official communiques but in more spontaneous expressions by militants and sympathizers on Internet chat sites and elsewhere.
Initially, according to the report, they perceived the US presence as extremely difficult to remove, "but that no longer is the case".
"Today, the prospect of an outright victory and a swift withdrawal of foreign forces has crystallized, bolstered by the US's perceived loss of legitimacy and apparent vacillation, its periodic announcement of troop redeployments, the precipitous decline in domestic support for the war and heightened calls by prominent politicians for a rapid withdrawal," the report states.
Moreover, "when the US leaves, the insurgents do not doubt that Iraq's security forces and institutions would quickly collapse".
That's not what the enemy is saying. That's what the things that they are saying will tell you if you have the sense to listen.
If you don't, then you'll be better staying in your box, and Bush is building some very nice big boxes:
A permanent basis for staying in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
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Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete - though less generally discussed in our media - than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country.
Quite literally, multibillions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lieutenant-Colonel David Holt, the army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing.
In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.
If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery and sheer incompetence, and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq's "Little America". For the first time, we have actual descriptions of a couple of the "super-bases" built in Iraq in the past two-and-a-half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon information restrictions, they are sobering.
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest US base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq". In a piece titled "Biggest base in Iraq has small-town feel", Ricks paints a striking portrait:
The base is sizeable enough to have its own "neighborhoods" including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF" ("home to a special operations unit", the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high walls", and so secretive that even the base army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks", a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10mph [miles per hour], a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage".
Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in "air-conditioned containers" which will, in the future - and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future - be wired "to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access". He points out as well that, of the troops at Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi."
Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another of the US "super-bases", the still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase. He observes of "the biggest marine camp in western Anbar province" that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of US suburbia". In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large - such bases may cover 40-50 square kilometers - that it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.
There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say - and they always deny that the US seeks "permanent" bases in Iraq - facts on the ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency".
Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: the words "permanent", "bases" and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report.
While a LexisNexis search of the past 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only US examples that could be found occurred when 80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the US might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not" was added to the mix via any US official denial. (It's strange, isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist in US papers in the negative?) Three examples will do:
The secretary of defense: "During a visit with US troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld said 'at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases' in Iraq. 'It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.'"
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq: "We already have handed over significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq."
US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show : "Charlie Rose: ... They think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? Karen Hughes: We want nothing more than to bring our men and women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish the job. Charlie Rose: And do not want to keep bases there? Karen Hughes: No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible."
The funning thing is, these "enduring bases" were already news before they were declared un-topics:
On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain" four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops". Rather than speak of "permanent bases", the military preferred then to speak coyly of "permanent access" to Iraq.
The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance, Saddam Hussein's 400,000-man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000-man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force. (In an otherwise heavily armed region, this ensured that any Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on the US military and that the US Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.)
While much space in our papers has, of late, been devoted to the administration's lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has been shown in the planning that did take place.
At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and Schmitt piece appeared, Rumsfeld insisted that the US was "unlikely to seek any permanent or long-term bases in Iraq" - and that was that. The Times' piece was in essence sent down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built - including four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times article - reports about US bases in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared from the US media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions of "permanent bases" in these past years at Internet sites such as Tomdispatch, Asia Times Online or Global Security.org.)
Last May, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported that the US had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro in Iraq. Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being "stood up" as a far larger force than originally imagined by Pentagon planners, leaving the US with, Graham reported, just the number of bases - four - that the Times first mentioned more than two years earlier, including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar province.
So, once the American media are again allowed to talk about the enduring bases, which seems to be beginning now, what will the story be? How are you going to sell this?
This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon thinking, but as a "withdrawal plan". (A modest number of these bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit transferred to Iraqi military units which, according to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)
The future of a fifth base - the enormous Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport - remains, as far as we know, "unresolved"; and there is a sixth possible "permanent super-base" being built in that country, though never presented as such.
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Even Prime Minister Tony Blair's Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman (Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base - sorry a base "for years to come" - near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking US "withdrawal" strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.
Sorry, but I hear about these plans and I keep thinking about Dien Bien Phu. Apparently, you know ... "great minds" and all that:
As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq forever and a day, while top Bush officials and neo-cons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that would control the energy heartlands of the planet.
None of that will, however, make such bases any more "permanent" than their enormous Vietnam-era predecessors at such places as Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved to be - not certainly if the Shi'ites decide they want us gone or Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.
Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases - call them what you will - have been at the secret heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction" of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs and their miniature golf courses, remain a part of this policy.
And a part of the deep structure available to any anthropologist who might care to study that strange tribe in DC who thinks that this is all possible, let alone a good idea.
There's nothing more democratic than a nation almost uniformly enfranchised with AK-47's. Power, after all, comes out of the barrel of a gun unless and until we agree otherwise. Failure to supress the insurgency is an ongoing vote of no-confidence from the people of Iraq. But our "leaders" were used to a docile American population that can, at least at critical points, be told to believe this, hate that, ignore the other. Our "leaders" forgot that they could not do this where they did not control all the "news" media. They were so sunk in their own fantasies that they forgot ... they were fantasies.
Having failed to learn how to defeat the opposition, the strategy now is to turn America's occupation of Iraq inside-out. We could not convert them to American style acquiescence so we're going to take our Pizza Hut and go home ... to our home away from home. Maybe there's something good on Tee-Vee.
What passes for America's leadership attained that position by dint of the fact that reactionaries make good followers. They stick together no matter what. This phenomenon has allowed a minority, whose policies only benefit a minority, to take control of our country and use it to set other contries on fire. But blowing shit up is the easy part. Once outside the nurturing environment of a Republican-owned media, the administration's motives, failures, and crimes were impossible to submerge anywhere but back in the US, where a supine population who like to think of themselves as rebels will believe whatever they are told.
The collision between this group of self-satisfied morons and others who, strangely enough, ALSO speak for God has been terrifying to watch.
But now they're giving up. They've built a habitrail of the suburb-and-strip-mall dystopia that spawned themselves and think that this culturally-controlled zone will protect them. Well, it may protect them from knowing their enemy, but it will not protect them from that enemy. They may claim that we are "on the wrong side of history," but they don't know any history. The history I know shows that people like this wind up dead or walking in long lines with their hands on their heads.
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