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October 17, 2006

Comments

jonst

I completely agree with what I take to be the premise of this post. It is odd that is declaration is getting so little attention. I would guess….and that is all it is, of course, a “guess” that somehow this signals that someone (whether correctly or not) thinks the civil war is about to really explode and now is the time to get your marker down. But the whole thing, the declaration, the lack of coverage, the reaction in the ME to it…..it all baffles me.

moloch-agonistes

Wouldn't the fact that it has received so little press attention argue against its being a psy-op? At least, not an American one.

It could, of course be a feint by some other player, like Iran, hoping to get the Amriki tilting at windmills again. But that would kind of make it good old "disinformation" rather than psyops. Wouldn't it? I never really understood the difference. Disinformation seems like such a useful, straightforward term...

aardvark

re PysOp, no it would work the opposite direction: if the target is the jihadis themselves, as I would assume it is, then American press coverage wouldn't be important compared to Arab press coverage - which is, in fact, the way it has been, lots of press coverage in the Arab world and little in the American. Not that I think that this proves anything, but it is what I would expect were it in fact an operation.

moloch-agonistes

Ah. I didn't get from your summary that there was lots of Arabic coverage.

Well, God knows about any of this speculation. One thing about a place where death, destruction and anarchy are the order of the day is that all the measures on which modern settled civilization depends -- accurate vital statistics, more or less accurate news coverage, rule of law and personal security, stable currency -- are out the window. We read these reports and try desperately to make inferences from them based on our own experience, but it often seems like a fruitless exercise. Not necessarily because human beings in Iraq today behave differently, but because the communication patterns in such a disrupted environment are totally altered. It's like reading a hagiography and treating it as a historical account.

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