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US Information Warfare ::: Big Brother at National Defense University
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- "Guerrillas don't hold ground," a specialist in
information warfare warns those who take comfort in the apparent success of the U.S.
military campaign in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden is a classic guerrilla leader, said Chuck deCaro, a former CNN
correspondent who is adjunct lecturer of strategy and information warfare at the
National Defense University in Washington. Americans should not believe bin Laden's al
Qaida network has been neutralized "just because you've swept over the top of
Afghanistan, where this guy was a parasite on the ruling government."
It's the nature of guerrilla movements that have been punished to emerge later at
another place, he told United Press International.
DeCaro is one of a small group of defense intellectuals who for years have been saying
that "archaic" Cold War, machine-age solutions won't work against enemies that have
adapted to the information age. Bin Laden, he says, is a four-dimensional "virtual"
terrorist whose area of operations is global. America must fight him by making its
case to the world.
DeCaro said that the apparent success in Afghanistan won't be fully realized until
after a lot of angry Taliban and al Qaida sympathizers who have dealt their way out of
capture are convinced that post-Taliban Afghanistan is a better place to be.
"You have to get at the reason for the guerrilla movement" and remove that as a
motivation for potential recruits, he said. An information campaign is necessary, even
if the message is: "You're not that good, and we'll come at you. And, Oh, by the way,
here is a better, stable, and prosperous Afghanistan after the Taliban."
DeCaro envisages a continuous marketing campaign. One approach is the unending
provision of video news releases documenting U.S. efforts in styles aimed at the
various "demographics" within the Islamic world. If those news releases aren't enough,
buy airtime, he said. "Women's issues could be especially highlighted, but it doesn't
go 10 days and stop. This is long term."
After Afghanistan, the United States should conduct similar information campaigns
everywhere bin Laden might have a cell or a population from which to draw people --
whether it be Indonesia, the Philippines or Trenton, N.J. -- and demonstrate that
"screwing with the United States is not a good idea while playing ball is a very good
idea."
DeCaro doesn't shrink from the word "propaganda." He does not advocate promulgating
falsehood, however, but rather getting America's story out to the world.
These information programs would play on every station or network that the U.S.
government could successfully promote them. DeCaro also advocates buying air time on
local television and, if necessary, starting or assisting competing networks beamed at
the "target demographics." Such an effort would be somewhat like Radio Free Europe, he
said, "but bigger, televised and more prolific."
"If we're giving away powdered milk, I want to be there taping it," he said. "I want
to follow that kid doing better in school. Make that available." In the machine age,
this sort of thing was done with leaflets and posters.
DeCaro used the advertising of Coca Cola to illustrate the need for constancy in
information warfare. "They sponsor a program. And that gives you the hook to the
demographic watching. Then you drop that commercial on them." DeCaro characterized
Coke's unchanging message as: "You want to drink this really cold brown fizzy stuff
from this can because it does this for you."
"Do they do that once?" the information warfare specialist asked rhetorically.
"Everybody in the world knows what Coca Cola is, and the company still spends billions
of dollars a year to maintain its market share. And we need to do the same thing."
Even a military success "does not engage the problem of a mindset," he said.
Asked what the U.S. government should be doing differently, he replied: "We could have
a thoroughly modern global information campaign demonstrating what the United States
is, what we're trying to do, where we're going, and what it is we can do to help you."
This would be an interagency effort involving the Defense Department, the National
Security Council, the State Department, the Commerce Department and others.
"We ought to be selling our case -- and not just the military case. We need to get the
message across that we are a land of equal opportunity. We tolerate other religions.
This is not a war against Islam. This must be done over and over and over, because not
everybody's wired in and gets the message the first time."
DeCaro said the United States represents economic opportunity. Washington's message:
"We're not here to take away all your resources and strip you blind. We want to do
business. We are a nation of businesses. In trading with us, we'll make your life
better."
This is a dynamic process that must be tailored to the target audience. Such public
relations campaigns would change from place to place and season to season.
The bodies politic are not all within geographic borders, he said. "You literally have
to sell them your approach" with the steady reassurance: "We are not a threat to you."
DeCaro is president of Aerobureau Corp., the heart of which is a four-engine,
turboprop airliner that serves as a platform from which broadcast news can be gathered
and transmitted.
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Joe Bob's America: Holy War
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NEW YORK, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- When men in war councils start invoking the name of God
thrice daily, every corpuscle of my cigar-wracked body groans like an infidel on the
inquisitor's rack.
I have nothing against the Almighty. I think the Big Guy knows what he's doing. But
I'm not sure he's inclined to delegate this much work to men who have been checked out
on M-16s.
To begin with, if you want to invoke His name without getting into major theological,
not to mention political, trouble, then you should probably refer to Him as "The God
of Abraham." I know it will tick off a few Buddhists and Zoroastrians here and there,
but at least it includes all the known zealots who are currently hacking one another's
limbs off.
The other night I saw a minister of the gospel on MSNBC who was asked whether she
thought Osama bin Laden believed in God, and her answer was, "It's not the God I know.
It's not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
Well, uh, no it's definitely NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It's the God of
Abraham, Ishmael and Mohammed. But at least this woman had the good sense to identify
that particular dividing point in our spiritual heritage. If she'd stopped at Abraham
-- the one we ALL agree on -- then maybe she would have been making a point about bin
Laden's heresy. Saddling him with two spiritual forebears he never claimed in the
first place is the equivalent of a Satanist condemning a Presbyterian in the name of
Madalyn Murray O'Hair's ghost. She seemed to be making HIS point, not hers.
I'm surprised that, with all the high-powered spiritual advisors trouping through the
White House these days, one of them hasn't said, "Uh, George, you know, we do have
this one problem: The whole Ishmael thing. Their religion sort of, uh, branched off
from ours when Abraham got a girl pregnant."
But, in fact, the opposite has occurred. Franklin Graham, evangelical heir apparent to
his father Billy's brand of white-bread Christianity, did his best to get the
anti-Islam ball into play. He pronounced Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" --
and was promptly ostracized for the remark. But wasn't he simply paraphrasing the Old
Testament curse that the sons of Ishmael would always behave like "wild asses,"
destined to be eternally at war? Perhaps he should have said, "Islam is a religion of
wild asses," if for no other reason than to preserve his defense in the original
Hebrew.
Then there's this whole "soul" business. Earlier this month President Bush said that
Osama bin Laden is "a man without a soul." If he was taking "soul" from the Pauline
epistles -- and we know that Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has been intentionally
using religious language -- then he was quoting the Greek word "psuche." He was saying
that bin Laden's "psuche" was missing.
Without going into the endless commentaries about the difference between soul and
spirit -- both words derived from "breath of life" -- suffice it to say that the
"psuche" is the lesser of the two. It's simply what makes bin Laden, bin Laden.
Nothing more. It can be a good soul, a bad soul, a busy soul, an indifferent soul, a
twisted soul, and yes, possibly an evil soul, but it's just the essence of
personality, something that emanates from this earth. If you wanna nail the guy
spiritually, you should say he lacks "pneuma," or spirit, which descends from heaven,
is eternal, and is the sort of animating breath of life that is incapable of blowing
up office buildings.
Personally I would prefer that we simply dispense with the Godhead in our official
speech altogether, or at least leave it to the Congressional chaplain, who's generally
hired for his ability to invoke the deity without being too specific about his
attributes, origins, nature, or relevance to anything that might turn out to be
embarrassing in the future.
Unfortunately, the poor man's finely honed skills are being wasted as one religious
leader after another stirs the theological stew-pot.
>From Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition: "(God) had a knowledge
>nobody else had. He knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way."
>We'll call this one the Divine Right of Presidents. (Presumably God also anointed the
>Florida Secretary of State.)
>From Tim Goeglein, a Bush aide: "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour,
>and I say this with a great sense of humility." (It's not clear whether he's humbled
>by the President, by God, or by his own message from a burning bush.)
>From Marvin Olasky, the editor of World magazine, who named Attorney General John
>Ashcroft "Daniel of the Year": "Just as the biblical Daniel faced an established
>idol-worshipping religion in Babylon, so our Dans must not back down in the face of
>deadly persecution abroad or the scorn and harassment that comes domestically from
>the academic and media high priests of our established religion, secular humanism."
So much for the Congressional chaplain; we might as well send the man home. Because if
one of our leaders is a genuine prophet, then he has no choice. He MUST speak in God's
name. I guess we could take some comfort in the fact that if he speaks anything false,
we're also obliged by God to kill him.
In my unspeakably Baptist hometown, there are children who are indoctrinated by being
forced to wear T-shirts that proudly state, "What would Jesus do?" (This can result in
unforeseen parental dilemmas. Some six-year-olds will take it as license to feed the
family's veal cutlets to the neighborhood drunk.)
But since President Bush happens to come from this selfsame fundamentalist Christian
Texas world that I know so well, why shouldn't we simply cut through all the
theological windsurfing and resort instead to this childlike question? The president
is, after all, a Christian. He does, after all, routinely participate in prayer
circles in the Oval Office. If we truly want God in the White House, and the Congress,
and the Pentagon, why don't we simply ask the question, what would Christ have done?
Well, we know two things Jesus did NOT believe in: offense and defense. So you can
neither attack nor defend and remain Christian. Jesus not only preached non-violence;
he preached absolute non-resistance to the violence of others. He preached not only
forgiveness of the original affront, but forgiveness nine times nine times when the
affront is repeated. He preached simplicity, poverty, and the willingness to suffer.
He compared himself and all who believed in him to lambs, led to the slaughter.
It will be objected, by the Pentagon chaplain, that his words were not to be taken
literally. It will be objected, by the Congressional chaplain, that so long as our
minds are pure and undefiled by hatred that we must fight to preserve the lives of
others. It will be objected, by the Supreme Court chaplain, that such a simple reading
of the New Testament would abolish all laws and render us helpless.
I didn't say it was practical. I said it's what the man said. That's why I would
recommend leaving God out of it for the time being. They didn't call him the Prince of
Peace for nothing.
--
(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or through his website at joebob-briggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002,
Dallas, TX 75221.)
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Operation "Enduring Fatality" in Afghanistan
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The Aerojet/Honeywell CBU-87 Cluster Bomb
The U.S. delivers approx. 14'500 land mines by 'air delivery' to Afghan civilians as
part of 'Enduring Freedom'
Sunday, November 25th, Kalakan village. A farmer returns to his village in the evening
and is killed as he walks on one of the CBU-87's 202 bomblets.
Tuesday, November 27th, village of Qala Shater near Herat, a 12yr. Old boy picks up
the bright yellow soda-can sized bomblet, looses his arm.
The CBU-87, 1'000 lb. bomb was developed by the Aerojet General Corp. in 1983, which
produced it along with the Alliant Techsystems Inc. [Hopkins, Minn.]. Today, the
CBU-87s are assembled in an Army factory in southern Kansas, from parts supplied by
Honeywell [Minn.] and Aerojet [Sacramento].
The 'mother bomb' carries 202 bright yellow bomblets [each the size of a soda can].
The mother bomb explodes about 300-400 feet above earth and the 202 bomblets are
dispersed with little parachutes. They aresupposed to explode upon landing, but at
least 5% do not. The CBU-87's 'footprint' is about 400x800 feet. One CBU-87 spreads
bomblets over about three football fields. One B1-B 'Lancer' bomber can carry 30
CBU-87 bombs.[74]
To date the US bombers have dropped about 600 CBU-87s upon Afghanistan. Doing the
arithmetic, assuming a dud rate of 12%, this means there are about 14'500 unexploded
bomblets littering the Afghan countrside and villages��akin to landmines.
Paul Watson and Lisa Getter, "Silent Peril Lies in Wait for Afghanistan's People," Los
Angeles Times [December 1, 2001].
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm
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"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out
hate; only love can do that."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and never will."
Frederick Douglass
Wealth heaped on wealth,
nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather
as the treasures rise.
Samuel Johnson
"When the people fear the government you have tyranny...
when the government fears the people you have liberty."
--Thomas Jefferson
Children of the Mist
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