Only Fit For Burning

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has an article on the status of U.S. psyops in the Iraqi media:

As'ad AbuKhalil, a political science professor at California State University who writes the Angry Arab blog, said the campaigns are ridiculed in the Arab world.

"They have a very crude tone and content, and the narrator sounds like Saddam's own propagandist," he said. "The Arabic used also is awkward, clearly translated from English texts most likely drafted in some office on K Street. One is struck by the extent to which the ads show Iraqis as Westernized and secularized."

..."All Iraqis know that these organizations are supported" by the U.S. government "with the aim of normalizing the occupation," said Abdul Kareem Ahmad, a lawyer in Salahuddin province. "I say to the Future Iraq organization: If those funds had been given to the poor and the widows, Iraq would have become a pioneer in social welfare. Millions of dollars go into the pockets of war profiteers who believe victory in Iraq can be won through the media using underground movies."

Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, said her friends and relatives ridicule the ads.

"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," she said. "Everyone knows they're American -- not Iraqi-made."

Much of the production of the billboard ads, video slots and free newspapers has long been contracted out to private American media companies, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Other efforts, like the US-military produced "Baghdad Now" newspaper are the product of military psychological warfare units. Either way, they're singularly ineffective with most Iraqis comparing the U.S. psyops campaign unfavorably to that of Saddam.

A U.S. Army officer in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could express criticism of the product, said the Iraqi soldiers at his outpost mock the publication and are more interested in the editorially independent Department of Defense newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and in the magazines soldiers get in the mail.

"They say it's childish," the officer said. "Baghdad Now makes a good fuel source at the Iraqi checkpoints."

Not even fit to wrap fish in.

So, of course, the Powers That Be, having been shown corporate and military powerpoint slides about how clever everyone is being, have decided to expand the Epic Fail.

Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, recently told lawmakers that the administration is working on a strategic communications plan for that region that draws on the lessons of Iraq.

"This is an area that has been woefully under-resourced," Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month. "The strategic communications plan -- including electronic media, telecom and radio -- will include options on how best to counter the propaganda that is key to the insurgency's terror campaign."

I tell you, the U.S. military and government are institutionally incapable of waging an effective people-centric counterinsurgency campaign. They say they can, on paper, but when the theory hits reality institutional inertia and exceptionalist arrogance does for them every time.