Georgian President Saakashvili got huge amounts of news coverage. Articulate, he got oogles of camera time to convince the American public of the legitimacy of the Georgian (his) cause. This raised in me the issue of just how real the war was, if the Georgia president could devote virtually all of his time to giving press interviews to American news channels after he'd spent a full hour on CNN's Larry King the night before.
Saakashvili made communicating to the foreign press to his primary duty. Talking to newspeople is great, but what about running the country when it's at war?
Lacking a 9/11-style "opportunity", Saakashvili could stir no primitive urges for revenge, but he did sell his case for American help quite smoothly, thanks to the mainstream media prostituting itself as a free public relations platform for him.
In its early attacks, Georgian troops--armed and trained by American and Israeli advisers--attacked populations centers in South Ossetia with no military or strategic value. At least the shock'n'awe we saw in the early days of the Second Gulf War was confined to government buildings in downtown Baghdad.
In the first Gulf War we Americans saw videos depicted striked on what were clearly military targets. This provided a clear positive benefit to the American propaganda effort.
What should trouble viewers should not be what they see, released by the government, but what they don't. Footage from in-bomb cameras or laser-guided systems won't show clips of munitions that landed on civilians areas, or aspirin factories like those in Somalia destroyed by cruise missiles by Bill Clinton in 1998.
Only the victories that our shown. Almost intolerable to watch are the friendly fire incidents, which rarely make the nightly news.
Recently the French just lost 10 "peacekeepers" outside Kabul in what may be a case of friendly fire. While they'd been attacked, an errant NATO airstrike is a possibility under investigation. Aljazeera.net cites a report from Le Monde: "when Nato planes finally arrived they hit French troops after missing their target..."
Like the Pat Tilman case, when and if the incident turns out to be friendly fire, mainstream media viewers in America will be the last to know. Certainly the incident will be glazed over with the French military equivalent of media advisers, semi-retired officers who purport to give expert testimony but really just give cover and creedence to anything the military seeks to promote--or deny. These plants help avoid criticism of the case for war, or scrutiny of the reasons for intervention, or any potential negative result like friendly fire deaths.
Shaping public perception
Shaping popular perceptions has been a central part of neo-con dogma since the origins of the movement back in the University of Chicago after World War Two. Leo Strauss taught that democracies must use Hitler-style techniques to manage mass opinion in order to prevent the rise of a second Hitler. Included in the repetoire of neo-con press management techniques is the suppression of information negative to their aims, which are presumably well-intentioned and necessary to preserve the functionings of democracy.
What if the neo-cons created an external enemy, radical Islamic fundamentalists, whose threat is illusory at best? What if the lofty purposes of the neo-con cause to protect democracies is hijacked by those who would then use the press as a conduit for some nefarious agenda, or to achieve some narrow goal or cause, like Zionism?
Historians may well look back at this period and be amazed at how gullible Americans were, and how we failed to see that we'd been manipulated by our own government in the aftermath of 9/11. Highly suspicious is the perfect segue from 9/11 to a military reaction that targetted Israel's enemies, most notably those with large oil reserves like Iraq and Afghanistan. We know maps of Iraqi oil fields were drawn out well in advance of 9/11; the Taliban signed a gas pipeline deal with an Argentine company over a bid from Unocal led by now-President Karzai and Condi Rice, who are now completing the project.
Knowing the potential of "agit-prop" (agitation/propaganda), why would the neo-cons stop with the radical Arab fundamentalists who flew planes into the WTC? Russia has been a clear target of the neo-cons since well before the 9/11 attacks. Many neo-cons cut their teeth on the Red Menace. Besides, the threat of terrorism appears to have been greatly diminished; which is perhaps not a product of the response but rather a more accurate reflection of the real, more limited scope of the threat.
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