The Medium is the Massage (That's a joke, not a typo)

Check out this article:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB219/index.htm

on George Washington University's excellent National Security Web Site. The article discusses the manipulation of media in Post-Saddam Iraq, and the transition from state-controlled media to an "Iraqi Free Media", whose message would, ironically, be controlled exclusively by the US, hence the white paper describing the apparatus and appropriate message to push.

The point here is not to notice that we wanted to manipulate the media in Iraq. I didn't need a Freedom of Information Act request to tell me that the USG wants to control the message in a time of war. They learned their lesson from Vietnam on that one.

The point IS that they did such a poor job of envisioning and planning how that might have been done. There is no mention in this document of any kind of alternative news sources, including low-budget, pirate TV news, nor does it give any thought to the internet (along the lines of Al Jazeera). This failure of imagination is staggering.

So even if we had won the military conflict, conducted a successful counter-insurgency operation, and executed our media-control strategy (we did none of these, except maybe the first), we would have been in the shit. If you can get a message out there, you can start a revolution.

That's what is so ironic about this whole document. Trying to find a way to truly control the message in this day and age is like writing a paper about how to square a circle. It's impossible by definition.

People have said, "The medium is the message". I don't know if that's true, but I think we can say that some time in the last quarter century, the medium became more important than the message. We live in an age of such volume of message that any particular thing is lost in the shuffle (a trend of which this blog is a symptom). Trying to control a message in that morass of soapboxes is, as I just said, impossible.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the situation with regard to message is a microcosm of this entire war. We have a politics and an attention span in this country with no appreciation for subtlety or nuance, and a situation in Iraq that is nothing but nuance. Trying to sum it up in a white paper, to say nothing of a political speech or, god forbid, a sound byte, is not an option. These matters take years of experience and honed instinct, something which few of our current leaders possess. They are really good at getting elected, laughably bad at understanding or governing. At least, it would be laughable if not for the death screams of all those people.