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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
U.S. Wages War of Words in Iraq from AP 
New York Times, September 15, 2005 U.S. Wages War of Words in Iraq By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 10:44 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military is mounting a counteroffensive in a war of words with Iraq's insurgents, firing off accusations of child murder, kidnapping, torture, brainwashing and plans to use chemical weapons. For much of the 2 1/2 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, Bush administration officials have complained of the insurgents' nimble use of propaganda to intimidate ordinary Iraqis and portray the Americans as anti-Islamic occupiers. U.S. officials have graded their own success in countering those charges as modest at best. It's not just the Iraqi population that U.S. officials want to influence. They also want to convince the American public that U.S. forces are winning and that the insurgents pose a threat that goes well beyond Iraqi borders. Whether by plan or happenstance, the latest anti-American charge -- that U.S. troops used poison gas during fighting in the northern city of Tal Afar -- is being answered with harsh words from U.S. commanders. On Tuesday, Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the main U.S. force in the Tal Afar fight, unleashed a verbal barrage. ''The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine,'' he told reporters at the Pentagon. ''Not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers,'' he added. On Wednesday, Col. Robert B. Brown made similar claims about the insurgents in the portion of northern Iraq his Stryker brigade combat team has been operating in for the past 11 months, including the city of Mosul. ''It's the most evil enemy we've ever faced,'' he said. Twice he mentioned ''brainwashing,'' noting that he was not sure that's an official term. ''That's what it seems like to me,'' he said, when the al-Qaida affiliate in Iraq headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi recruits young foreign fighters and sends them on suicide missions. He cited a captured Libyan who was ''clearly brainwashed'' to think he was coming to Iraq to fight American crusaders against the Muslim religion. ''He got here, he saw that it was not correct,'' Brown said. ''They told him that he was going to be a suicide martyr.'' When captured, the Libyan was ''very happy to talk to us.'' Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq watcher at the Brookings Institution think tank, said Wednesday that U.S. efforts to demonize the insurgents are unlikely to satisfy the main concern of the American public -- ''whether we're making any progress.'' Both McMaster and Brown portrayed the insurgency as weakening and losing the support of the Iraqi population. But their optimistic assessments came amid a growing death toll among ordinary Iraqis, including the series of attacks Wednesday in Baghdad that killed at least 160 people and wounded hundreds more. The coordinated bombings marked Baghdad's bloodiest day since the end of major combat in May 2003. ''You have to ask: Why are the casualty levels of U.S. and Iraqi forces as high as ever?'' O'Hanlon said. ''I'm not convinced the insurgency is weakening. I feel like I've been hearing that story for about two years and it's never been right yet.'' Brown emphasized the insurgents' efforts on the propaganda front, which some call information warfare. ''They're masters at information operations and they want to grab headlines and take away from the success that we're having,'' he said. ''And I think that we're having success in Tal Afar and many other areas now, in Mosul and all over the north of Iraq. So they're trying to steal those headlines away. And it's really desperate.'' In a similar vein, McMaster cited ''the enemy's propaganda'' on extremist Web sites, including an audiotape posted Sunday that purportedly carried the voice of al-Zarqawi accusing U.S. forces of using poison gas in the Tal Afar fighting. McMaster said U.S. troops in a residential area of Tal Afar had discovered barrels of chemicals rigged with explosives and apparently intended to be detonated to kill civilians. He said this was part of the terrorists' campaign of deceit: to use the chemical blast against civilians and then blame it on American forces. ''We found some manuals that described how they could make sort of these kind of chemical dirty bombs,'' he said. |