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My new book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War, is now available from online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Armed Forces Journal recently ran a profile of the book. Editor-in-chief Karen Walker writes, "this guide offers ways that could discredit, divide and ultimately squelch the enemy into a blob of irrelevance."
The Iranian government has deployed a political warfare strategy to force a humiliating defeat on the United States in Iraq by manipulating the US Congress.
And while some of us have suspected that for a long time, the real surprise is the source: Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper.
"'Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. 'They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government].'"
US commanders in Iraq are reading for a widespread summer offensive orchestrated by Iran, and consisting of an alliance among al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents, and Shi'ite militias. Iran's goal, according to the Guardian, is for the uprising to "trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat."
"We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," a US official tells the paper.
Simultaneously in Afghanistan, Iran is backing Taliban military attacks on American, British and other NATO forces, according to the report.
"Tehran's strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally."
Bloggers and other commentators seeking an American withdrawal or defeat in Iraq have been attacking the Guardian as a "US mouthpiece" and alleging that the deputy editor is a spy.
The first-ever major, random, nationwide survey of Muslims in America contains some surprises of interest to political warriors.
The Pew Research Center poll of 1,050 Muslim adults in the US finds substantial opposition to Islamist extremism, but equally strong opposition to the "War on Terror." Muslims in the US are "highly assimilated," close to the national norm in terms of income, and far more part of their country than are Muslims in Europe.
While press coverage stressed that American Muslims "overwhelmingly" oppose al Qaeda (how sad that such a conclusion is considered positive news in 2007), the poll also showed that 32 percent of respondents either had a favorable image of the terrorist group or they wouldn't or couldn't give an answer. Another 10 percent had only a "somewhat unfavorable" view of bin Laden's organization, meaning that four in ten Muslims in this country are still not "with us" against al Qaeda.
That's the bad news. There's also good news. First, 78 percent say that suicide bombings against innocent civilians are justified to defend Islam (I'm trying to be positive, folks; the figure also shows that nearly one in four Muslims in this country can't bring themselves to say the same). Second, Muslim immigrants tend to be more hopeful about life in the United States and about an ethic of hard work than are US-born, African-American Muslims. Black Muslims here also tend to more supportive to al Qaeda than immmigrants, according to the results. And younger Muslim immigrants, or children of Muslim immigrants, tend to be more extreme than those over age 30.
The poll shows that a big Republican activist's attempts to bring Muslims into the "big tent" have flopped. Despite President George W. Bush's hug-a-Muslim campaign, and the extraordinary lengths to which the administration and the Republicans have gone to woo Muslim voters, the poll shows that American Muslims overwhelmingly lean Democrat - by 6 to 1, despite their being socially conservative.
The poll also de-bunks a huge myth perpetrated by Islamist groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), echoed by Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes (pictured), that the Muslim population in the US is between 6 and 7 million.
The poll - and it's the only well-regarded, large, random, scientific survey of its kind - concludes that there are only about 2.35 million Muslims in this country, of whom only 1.4 million are over age 18. This item is a big blow to CAIR propagandists, whose unsubstantiated but endlessly repeated figures have become a sort of "known fact."
I asked Secretary Hughes' office to substantiate the 6-to-7 million Muslims figure and got a rather sarcastic response back, to the effect that I would not be provided the source but that the State Department had better Muslim advisors who knew a lot more than I did. The response is in writing, but I plan to give the folks over there one last chance to come up with the truth before I hold them accountable for amplifying and legitimizing CAIR agitprop.
Attention all Information Operations personnel: The Smith-Mundt Act does not apply to you!
Next time a Public Affairs Officer or JAG tells you that you can't run a good IO against the enemy because you might be "propagandizing the American people," tell her to read the law.
Time and again I've seen it in writing where military PAOs and JAGs sabotage wartime info ops by invoking the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act.
The law, which established US public diplomacy and international broadcasting as we know it today, contains a provision that bans the State Department and the former US Information Agency (USIA) from releasing information to Americans that is designed for foreign audiences. USIA was an independent agency under the State Department.
The Smith-Mundt Act is officially known as Public Law 402. See Title 22 of the United States Code. The part that military public affairs officers and lawyers wrongly invoke is Chapter 18, Subchapter V, "Dissemination Abroad of Information About the United States." The operative language appears in § 1461. The "Secretary" in that clause, as the rest of the law specifies, is the Secretary of State.
Smith-Mundt and its amendments in the 1972 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, the 1985 Zorinsky Amendment, and the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring act of 1998 refer only to the State Department and USIA. The law is written very narrowly. There is no mistaking that Congress did not intend for the law to apply to the Department of Defense.
If Congress wants the law to apply to DoD, it can amend the law. Until then, the Pentagon should stop acting like it's bound to Smith-Mundt. The Secretary of Defense should instruct all PAOs and JAGs from using the law as a pretext for shutting down IO, and should discipline those who fail to comply.
Now delivered to your driveway in time for breakfast: Paid Chinese propaganda. The Washington Post is the delivery system for “Reports from China,” a six-page Chinese Communist Party propaganda tract posing as an “advertising supplement."
The sheet, appearing under the rubric of China Daily, is designed to resemble a real newspaper. It appears to be modeled after the Washington Post’s ongoing Russian propaganda supplement paid for by the Kremlin’s semi-official Rossiyskaya Gazeta paper and Novosti “news” agency.
The first issue of “Reports from China” appeared as section H1 of the May 15 Washington Post. Don’t look for truth-in-labeling there. The Post does not carry a disclaimer to tell the reader that supplements are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the respective regimess in Beijing and Moscow.
A human rights group is counting the days and hours until Venezuela's doomed opposition television station, RCTV, is shut down on instructions of dictator Hugo Chavez. Thirteen days to go, as of this posting.
To track the count and take part in the action items, visit FreeRCTV.net. In Spanish, it's RCTVlibre.com.
The sites are a project of the Human Rights Foundation.
In a segment about the most recent riots in France, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News interviewed this blogger to comment on the alliance between French Islamist extremists, Marxists and anarchists.
The radicals have joined forces to riot against the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president.
The interview aired on the May 9 edition of The O'Reilly Factor. During the interview, this blogger spoke of the transnational nature of the Islamist-leftist alliance, citing recent arrests across Germany that hauled in a suspected terror network believed to have been plotting against the June G-8 summit.
O'Reilly also promoted this blogger's latest book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War. To view the video of the three-minute interview, click here.
(The map illustrates the main flashpoints of the Islamist riots of 2005. Courtesy http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/france_at_night.php)
Eleven former chiefs of the Voice of America, reflecting the broadest political spectrum, have signed a joint statement opposing the Bush Administration's plans to slash or abolish VOA broadcasting in key languages, including Russian and English. PublicDiplomacy.org carries the text of the March 5 letter:
"We former directors of the Voice of America urgently appeal for a reversal by Congress of planned reductions in VOA that could silence the nation's largest publicly-funded overseas broadcast network in much of the world. Taken together, the cuts would seriously jeopardize our national security and public diplomacy. Further, they would deprive millions of people of access to a fully free and open media, a core value of what our nation is all about.
"The Bush administration has proposed to eliminate VOA English in every continent except Africa, abolish services in Cantonese, Croatian, Georgian, Greek, Thai and Uzbek, cease radio broadcasts in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, and Hindi (to India), and significantly scale back programming in Tibetan and Portuguese to Africa.
"In view of:
"We urgently appeal for an increase of the proposed $178 million VOA budget to $204 million for fiscal year 2008 beginning October 1. This would be mandated to cover programming and transmission of services listed above, 3.9 percent of the entire U.S overseas broadcasting budget. This is a tiny but essential investment. Surveys show anti-American opinion abroad to be at an all-time high. At this critical moment in the post 9/11 era, the United States simply cannot, for its own long term strategic safety and security, unilaterally disarm in the global contest of ideas."
Mary G. F. Bitterman
Robert E. Button
Richard W. Carlson
Geoffrey Cowan
John Hughes
David Jackson
Henry Loomis
E. Eugene Pell
Robert Reilly
R. Peter Straus
Sanford J. Ungar
March 5, 2007
For decades, the Walt Disney Company has unleashed its lawyers on those who violate its copyrights. And rightly so. Mickey Mouse and friends are Disney's intellectual property, and unlicensed reproduction of Disney characters - or reasonable facsimiles thereof - rip off Disney shareholders.
So as a Disney shareholder, I'm expecting the company's nasty lawyers to jump all over Hamas.
As part of its political warfare strategy to indoctrinate the next generation, Hamas has pirated Mickey Mouse and turned him into a TV mascot for Arab kids.
Palestinian Media Watch posted stills and video from the terrorist propaganda show and recently made them public (see photo). Will Disney CEO Robert Iger slap a lawsuit on Hamas? Disney shareholders want to know.
UPDATE: At about 2040 hrs EDT on May 9, the Associated Press reported from Ramallah that Hamas pulled the terrorist Mickey Mouse program off the air. The Walt Disney Corporation had no comment.
UPDATE #2: Reporting from Gaza City on June 30, the Associated Press announced that Farfour, the Hamas Mickey Mouse character, had beaten to death on the final episode of the children's program. Farfour was seen being bludgeoned by an actor playing a murderous Israeli official. A "teen presenter" named Sara told the audience, ""Farfour was martyred while defending his land."
The Army is making it rough on those of us who advocate a stronger military role in the war of ideas. As if it wasn't hard enough already to get the truth out about the war effort and generate public support for a truly noble effort, the Army is making it even harder.
"Operational security" is the supposed reason behind the latest brilliant stroke in the war on terror: A total ban on emails, blogging and other electronic communication from the troops in the field. Unless, of course, those messages are censored first.
There's a lot to be said for cracking down on the sending of messages, images and other electronic data that harm the war effort. And certainly there's a huge security concern about undisciplined disclosure of information. But World War II ended before many of our generals were even born, and it's time for the military to understand the age of the wired grunt and adapt accordingly.
And implement far more rigorous counterintelligence procedures and practices, which is a crux of the real problem.
With few exceptions, the military's IO and public affairs policies are primitive enough as they are, even though we have all the technology and human talent we need. Mindless, blanket censorship of all electronic communications isn't going to help things.
