Al Qaeda's information management in Iraq

Belmont Club:

The press and political pressure helped 'lose' the first battle of Fallujah, an Army report says. UPI reports:

A secret intelligence assessment of the first battle of Fallujah shows that the U.S. military thinks that it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to "political pressure" that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents. ...

The authors said the press was "crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations," from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a "unilateral cease-fire" by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations. ...

Crucial to the failure, the authors said, was the role of the Arabic satellite news channels Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. An Al Jazeera crew was in Fallujah during the first week of April 2004, when the Marines began their assault on the city of 285,000 people. ...

By contrast, the assessment stated that later in 2004, when U.S.-led forces successfully retook Fallujah, they brought with them 91 embedded reporters representing 60 press outlets, including Arabic ones. "False allegations of non-combatant casualties were made by Arab media in both campaigns, but in the second case embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal," the authors said.

The key to counteracting disinformation campaigns like that mounted during the First Fallujah, was to break the stranglehold of "access journalism". As the Army report concluded, once there were a multiplicity of reportorial sources on-scene it became difficult to manipulate the message. Fake messages can still be generated, but they must compete with those produced by other observers. After a while the fake messages become outliers because, as tends to be the case, the larger the sampling size the greater the tendency of the statistic to converge to the true value. The open source software maxim that "all bugs are shallow when there are many eyes" also applies to reportage. False testimony cannot survive if there are many witnesses.

Al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents also drew their conclusions from the belated arrival of the second wave of journalists to the First Fallujah and became determined to prevent its repetition. And the most effective way for insurgencies to recreate the "access journalism" so advantageous to them was to kidnap journalists. This they did to great effect....

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There were other aspects to al Qaeda's information management campaign that the media did go along with. Most of al Qaeda's attacks were more public relation events than military operations. They would send out one of their operatives to explode in the middle of a group of mostly Shia non combatants. You would think that the media would recognize this as a war crime, since the perpetrators would camouflage themselves as civilians. Instead of talking about the wickedness of this type of attack, the media would focus on the failure to stop it, which played into al Qaeda's theme of being an unstoppable force. The Geneva Conventions were rarely mentioned when it came to enemy actions even though almost everyone of the enemy actions was a violation.

Had the media done its job these attacks would nave stopped much sooner, because they would not have been having the intended PR effect. If the US military had been attempting a similar manipulation the media would have been outraged. Instead the media focused its outrage on the administration for not stopping the wicked attacks. While the media was acting in an incompetent fashion, it was loudly accusing the President and other sin his administration of incompetence. Liberals in the media still use that theme, even though the same administration finally found a general with a strategy to deal with al Qaeda's wickedness.

One of the ironies is, that by protecting the people from al Qaeda, we were also protecting the media, and more reporters could get back into the neighborhoods and start covering the real war rather than the one the imagined in their hotel room. Once they did, like the situation in Fallujah, the enemy lost some of his control of the message.