Al Qaeda continues to dominate media battle space

J.D. Johannes:

In Iraq, the administration has empowered a general and officer corps capable of winning the war on the ground. Now it must develop the media corps that can win the war on the airwaves. June 2007 saw a dramatic turnaround in our military fortunes, with the insurgents in headlong retreat in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diayala. But al Qaeda continued to dominate its chosen battlefield: America's living rooms.

In the first month of full implementation - June, 2007 - the "surge" strategy of General David Petraeus resulted in a 32% decline in Iraqi deaths. An anti-al Qaeda alliance of Sunni chiefs, Coalition forces, and the Iraqi Army drove the insurgency out of most of al Anbar, and much of Baghdad.

Over the past three months, I was privileged to observe "surge" operations as a reporter embedded with combat units. I assure my readers: these operations were no mere repetition of the futile "clearing" raids of the past. General David Petraeus has implemented a regimen based on a career-long study of counterinsurgency. The revised tactics include meticulous census taking of persons and vehicles; skilled, persistent diplomacy with tribal leaders; incorporation of local intelligence; constant foot patrols in the residential areas from platoon and squad sized outposts; and persistent perimeter control of areas cleared and held.

But in the flush of battlefield success, public perception of American military progress continued its calamitous decline. According to Pew Research, the percentage of Americans who opine that America's military operations are "going well" slid from 38% in May '07 to 34% in June; those who believe our military operations are "not going well" increased from 57% of respondents to 61%.

The same Pew poll found that only 30% of the public could identify General David Patraeus and only 27% could identify Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. 59% of respondents were unaware that Shi'ites constitute the majority religious group in Iraq. Precise knowledge of the war's progress is obviously scarce. Yet 95% of respondents have defined opinions on the success of our arms.

What explains the downtick of confidence against a backdrop of success?

Since mid-2005, al Qaeda has aimed not to defeat the Coalition militarily, but to drain American public support politically. The strategy was forced on the insurgents by a string of failures in 2004 and 2005. The Baathist groups and their al Qaeda allies planned first to establish a geographic base of control within Iraq; second, to block Iraqi elections; and third, to prevent the establishment of the Iraqi Security Forces. They failed to achieve any of these goals.

The ensuing strategy was dictated by weakness. Mass killings of Shi'ite civilians - a tactic designed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi over the initial protests of the al Qaeda leadership - replaced military confrontation as the insurgency's operational focus. Civilian atrocity is, by definition, easy to implement, as it targets what is undefended. The strategy does nothing to "win hearts and minds." Support for al Qaeda has dwindled to under 2% among the Sunnis of Iraq; among other groups, it doesn't register at all. Nor can atrocities advance a political agenda, or control real estate.

...

The enemy has lost the hearts and minds battle in Iraq, but it winning it in Congress. This has to be one of the strangest public relations successes of all time. Al Qaeda's war crimes are ignored, and its loss are ignored and a perception of hopelessness is attached to the winners. It is beyond passing strange, but Democrats have embraced defeat and made it work so far. The military is not engaged in the PR war and the administration is not effective on that front either. It is something that needs to be added to the counterinsurgency warfare manual if we are to win this type of conflict. The communist were given a strategic victory for their defeat in the Tet offensive and it appears the media is doing the same for al Qaeda in this war. The author has much more on the media battle space and how the enemy is waging its war there.