The Enemy Is Us - Salon.com

[Clinton Crusader]

http://www.salon.com

The Enemy Is us
In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological
warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique -- and used it against the American people.
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By Sam Gardiner
Sept. 22, 2004 |

On Thursday, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will speak before a joint meeting of Congress, and from what he said in London on his way to the United States, it looks like Americans are going to be getting more of the strategic information operations that have been crucial to Bush's policy on Iraq from the beginning.

On Monday, Allawi said at a press conference: "Terrorists are coming and pouring into Iraq to try to undermine the situation in Iraq ... And God forbid, if Iraq is broken or the will of Iraq is broken, then
London will be a target, Washington will be a target." In those sentences, Allawi employed the basic doctrine of strategic information operations: Influence emotions, motive and objective
reasoning. Use repetition to create a collective memory in the target audience. And the recurrent message of both Allawi and the Bush administration is: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

The Army Field Manual describes information operations as the use of strategies such as information denial, deception and psychological warfare to influence decision making. The notion is as old as war itself. With information operations, one seeks to gain and maintain information superiority -- control information and you control the battlefield. And in the information age, it has become even more imperative to influence adversaries.

But with the Iraq war, information operations have gone seriously off track, moving beyond influencing adversaries on the battlefield to influencing the decision making of friendly nations and, even more
important, American public opinion. In information denial, one attempts to deceive one's adversary. Since the declared end of combat operations, the Bush administration has orchestrated a number of deceptions about Iraq. But who is its adversary?

In August 2003, the administration's message was that everything in Iraq was improving. The White House led the information effort and even published a paper on the successes of the first 100 days of the occupation. By October the message had shifted: Things were going well in Iraq, but the media was telling the wrong story.
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:kick:

[Parche]

1. bushisms

its better to get them over there then here crap
kill the killers
sept 11th changed everything


Are we all tired of these run down phrases that GW Bush keeps
using?

[Tamyrlin79]

2. re: sept 11 changing everything

A good response to this would be that America's humanitarian values have not changed, and that the constitution which embodies our ideals was not repealed by sept. 11, so that has not changed either. Thus, it is wrong to say that EVERYTHING has changed.