[Ramona_A_Stone]

...some Iraqi's, some News Media and others are just trying to sway the hearts and minds of Americans, to get the masses wanting the troops pulled from Iraq. It is to bad some need to glorify it with pictures and video.

Yeah I guess it'd be better if we were just kept in the dark about it.

It's funny that when the videos are of us killing Iraqis, you think it's "AWESOME."

from Appache killing video

Originally posted by theknife

masturbation material for conservatives

originally posted by Sinner
....I agree..................That was AWESOME!!!

Originally posted by span
we need more videos of us killing assholes with high powered weaponry.

I guess you might prefer that the media only show us killing the enemy and purge all images of the enemy killing us. It would certainly be good PR for the war effort, but one can't help notice that while you whine about the reportage of actual events in Fallujah being "propaganda," you'd seem to prefer your own brand. I won't call this ironic since I realize the supposed ultimate practicality of such an approach.

This in fact cuts to very intention of my post, simply an observation of how truly ironic it is that the president's dad gives "glorified" lip service to sonny-boy while the facts of what's really going on in Iraq shoot completely over his head in technicolor real time. How we love self-congratulatory assurances being lathered on the American public (at a petrochemical organization function, no less) about the certain success of their 'miraculous' reshaping of Iraq from within--when it's almost exactly a year to the day that Little Lord Bushleroy declared "major combat over" and this last month was the second deadliest since the beginning of the war. Roll it all up in a package of framing anyone who discusses reality being "ignorant elites on the campaign trail" and the irony is truly fucking mind-searing.

It didn't make me "giddy," as span suggested, and I found it far from funny. I didn't see juxtaposing these events from my "high horse" as a particularly stellar intellectual feat as they were already there in the bald reportage that spilled across my monitor on a given day. It was done without comment as I was pretty certain the contrasts would jar any sentient being.

Of course it didn't seem to work any particular magic on span, because apparently he felt that a 6 month old understatement by Rumsfeld somehow smoothed over the ragged edges of the data and made it all just perfectly palatable.

I find myself in the position of having to constantly lubricate all discourse in order to insert the seemingly unthinkable idea that when a politician starts a war, stakes his image on it and clings to it for dear life through a campaign season, he and everyone around him develop a greater and greater tendency to talk out their asses about it. In fact, the more the actual effort may falter or prove difficult, the more gas gets expelled, until eventually the official noise bears no resemblance to reality at all. I'm not comparing this war itself to Vietnam, but the homefront attitudes look and behave exactly as they did in that war--and this in itself is a war of information.

Of course I don't expect Georgie Senior to lament about the astoundingly low morale and startingly high suicide rates among troops over the summer, or to break down and freak out about how glaring the pure hatred of the occupation is among many Iraqis, or talk about a stressed American military or the possibility of needing to reinstate the draft, or even to amplify Rummy's little warnings. He can "nearly cry" while talking about how he was mistreated by the liberal press, but I don't expect him to weep from the podium about how many future lives this war will cost.

None of this would be good PR. Got to keep the public psyched, gotta talk loud and fast to cover the sound of the meat grinders.

The real war against terror will become more and more a war of information, just like Vietnam did, and you gotta hand it to Old King George for knowing this good and well, which is precisely why he bitches about and wishes he could discredit the press. The administration is at war with tiny pockets of almost infallible remote media events which are designed by master craftsmen of terror. These guys can work very effectively and almost indefinitely with a handful of nothing and cut through layers and layers of media filters like butter.

You don't have to drag charred American bodies through the streets on any massive scale to achieve the psychological aim in your target audience, which is basically creating an Iraq where Americans are less than entirely comfortable to be. Over the long term, this works remarkably well, but it can be a long and painful process to learn... just like Rummy sez.

A vigorous morale isn't just necessary in the boys on the front line, it's critical in the public opinion and and the world view. To sustain the effort none of these dynamics must fall below critical mass.

Col. Virgil Patterson, chief of the Army Mental Health Advisory Team which conducted a troop moral survey pointed out the morale issues in the Iraqi theater, with 23 suicides so far, are very significant. They point mostly to long, 'vague' missions for many deployed there, the inhospitable climate, 30 day waits for mail from home and other factors added to the normal stress.

The results of this survey were discussed on Talk of the Nation, NPR, also, coincidentally, on March 31st:

Interviewer: All war is by its very nature extremely stressful, with the situation in particular in Iraq, do you see any relation between mission and morale, in other words as the mission of American troops becomes more and more controversial, does that effect morale?

Dr. Paul Ragan (Associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center): Without question. Without question. And I think we have to be very careful it's such an obvious thing, if we don't remember, it will be history repeated. And that's exactly what happened in Vietnam. Once the mission becomes ambiguous... it turns out when you place humans in a no-win situation, that induces anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress disorder, and so do a lot of our highly trained young people in Iraq, with great weapons systems... are they placed in a no-win situation? Because with lo-tech weapons and techniques they are being stymied. And you can't just suddenly turn around and mow down a whole bunch of people because someone's lobbed a homemade explosive at you and then fade it off into the marketplace. If we place them in these very untenable situations that will induce an enormous amount of distress and stress and strain that can lead to poor morale, and if you read the army's report, they didn't highlight it, but they describe very poor morale... 50-70% had low morale, and that's highly, highly concerning...

Obviously the reality of war is very different when you're in it than when you're sitting on the sidelines cheering over 'Apache killing videos' or jeering at hateful third world assholes. This is easy enough to concede even while admitting we can't imagine the order of magnitude. When people are getting hung up like coyotes on fenceposts down the street from you, it feels much different than viewing it on the internet from a quiet suburban nook.

The fact is our soldiers find themselves in a significantly different environment than most of them--and their families--expected.

Expectations. Now how do those get created? Perhaps by people who sold this conflict as a "quick and easy war"? Perhaps by politicians talking about the wonderful Walt Disney quality of Democracy and freedom and how thankful the Iraqi people would be to have us as their saviours?

How many more Americans will have to die at the hands of small mobs or in the snares of juvenile pedestrian kamikazes, and at what rate, before the futility of hanging around sets in?

...It's just another curious irony that some of you armchair war quarterbacks seem--seem mind you, thank god I can't read your minds--to take the fact that Americans are dying at the hands of small groups who are violently opposed to the occupation as all the more reason to be there. The idea of "getting in, doing the job and getting out," where the job was taking Hussein out and handing the affairs of Iraq back to the Iraqi people, seems to have taken a back seat, (in fact this whole forum being almost devoid of such topics indicates a larger climate of relative cluelessness about when, how and if this is going to happen, and whether it could or should).

And yet it also never seems to cross your minds that this is exactly what terrorists want: a target-rich audience.

Couldn't help but notice that the 'latest comment' posted at the site with the article Sinner posted, above, which I just read in full, reflects my own views on this strikingly:

From: American Kafir 4/3/2004 12:10:22 AM
It's obvious they're committing these atrocities to provoke US forces into taking the kind of action that armchair bitches like Peggy Noonan and Tammy Bruce advocate. For the terrorists, this is a pretty dull war since there aren't enough images of 8-year-old boys throwing rocks at US tanks for the entire world to see, there aren't enough bulldozers giving towns like Fallujah a facelift. The terrorists WANT a massive escalation of the conflict that'll give them many more opportunities to dismember American corpses...

If you find me "giddy" or on a "high horse" about this, I can only suggest that it's because these have been consistently my views about terrorism and enantiodromia, and they seem to be becoming clearer and clearer to more and more people. I don't take any particular pleasure in being right--in fact I will take less and less pleasure the longer, the harder and the sloggier is the road to it becoming consensus.