Explosions in the media battle space back fire

Strategy Page:

... The bombings in the capital make it clear that Algerian Islamic radicals have indeed switched from their previous tactics of rural attacks, to the al Qaeda method of going for more newsworthy events in big cities. The latest attacks had the desired impact on international media, but made Islamic radicals even more unpopular inside Algeria. The senior Islamic cleric in the country condemned the attacks, and the Islamic terrorists behind them. By playing to the media, with urban attacks against civilians, al Qaeda increased their popularity among Moslems in countries where there is no Islamic terrorism (including Europe), but made themselves very unpopular in countries suffering the attacks. From a strategic point of view, this makes no sense. But terrorist bombings are not a path to victory, but a desperate ploy to try and avoid the destruction of your movement. And the media loves it. Nothing better than a spectacular disaster, carried out by a sinister organization that threatens to do it again and again. Best of all, the bad guys can never take over, because their terrorism angers the very people they depend on for shelter and support.

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The media keeps playing to the terrorist script and missing the underlying reality of the impotence of the enemy and his alienation of hearts and minds through his strategy of intimidation. By focusing on the government's failure to stop such attacks rather than the war crimes of the enemy, the media is writing the story to his script and letting him off the hook for his wickedness.

Wretchard at the Belmont Club discusses the wickedness in the context of the attack in Karbala, Iraq:

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Implicit in the enemy use of these tactics is the presumption that its political target has a moral sensibility -- that it somehow cares about the threat to kill innocents unless it bends to their evil will. Otherwise it would not be affected. Blackmail is useless against those who don't care for the victims because there can be no assault on the sensibility of the insensible. Pity and virtue are treated as weakness -- but only by evil -- by those who hate pity, and hate it from pride.

But still more evil than terrorists are those who help them in projecting a moral inversion. For terrorists are themselves fully cognizant of the difference between innocence and guilt. It is this fine sensibility that allows terrorists to design one outrage greater than the other; that teaches it to seek out the child that they might mutilate it....

How can anyone leave the field to such evil? Or think that we could, by giving it victory, escape it ourselves?

Does the media comprehend how it is projecting the moral inversion? Probably not, but they should. Since the enemy attacks are part of their media battle space campaign and not a contest of arms with our troops, how many attacks would the enemy make on non combatants if he got not media coverage? Or if the media must cover it, how many attacks would he make if the focus of the story was on the war crime being perpetrated and the wickedness of the enemy. If it were made into a story that held the enemy in a bad light rather than the government for not stopping it it would have a different effect and fewer innocents would be killed.