The administration has now
pledged $350 million for the tsunami disaster, which is more like it. This tit-for-tat game of one-upmanship between the US and Europe, upping their grants in order to show each other up, has been great for those stricken by disaster. Hopefully the EU and individual European nations will fear looking bad in the face of the $350 million announcement and up their totals as well.
It'll take more than a few hundred million to prevent a calamity of unprecedented proportions in the nations affected by the tsunami.
While better late than never, we lost a golden opportunity to score a huge PR victory in the world stage, and, with the largest muslim nation in the world (Indonesia).
Had we announced $350 million from day one, it would've scored a direct hit -- backing up rhetoric about American generosity. Instead, it looks like we're responding to criticism about American stinginess, rather than acting out of the goodness of our hearts.
This isn't a question about reality, but about perception. And in the global battle against terrorism, our enemies are outflanking us in the PR department. Running circles around us, in fact. And again, that's not liberal Kos saying that, but Bush and Rumfeld's own Pentagon:
The information campaign -- or as some still would have it, "the war of ideas," or the struggle for "hearts and minds" -- is important to every war effort. In this war it is an essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.
While $350 million sounds like a lot of money (and it is), in fact, it's the cost of 38 hours of operation in Iraq (the
math).
If this war is tied to the struggle for hearts and minds, and if winning the public relations battle is paramount for success, how would $350 million best be spent? In less than two days of combat operations in Iraq, or by winning global accolades for generosity and selflessness? Heck, making it $1 billion would've blown the socks of the world, while representing only about five days of combat operations in Iraq.
But the idiots in the White House think in terms of bombs and body counts, not in winning hearts and minds. Which is yet one more reason, in a long line of reasons, that we're losing the war.
Comments are closed on this story.