My Thoughts on Zarqawi - Collected Comments

#Start
The media has tried to report Zar dieing, like they tried to do it with Saddam. The military has never officially declared Saddam or Zar captured/dead until they actually could confirm it.

The military already knows that they should not believe everything they hear. There is a reason for this, and I’ll come back to it later at the end here.

In retrospect, this would make a great propaganda film. Just visualize it. Here you have a swaggering murderer and assassin moving around beheading people like Nick Berg, going from house to house. Then a bomb finally takes them out and they acquire the body. You could do it in two ways. The first half of the film could be full of blood and savagery, and endless party of death and mutilation as we witness Z-man’s death and jihad fun. Throw in some emotional and heart tearing testimony from the victims, and we have the same emotional setup as the Iranian hostage incident.

Then the second half we would see Z-Man running afraid from house to house, his LTs dieing in droves, and finally a bomb blows him up.

That’s one way to do it. Another version of the propaganda President Bush can fund with Pentagon funds is this. First half stays the same, to setup the audience and tie them in to the faceless deaths that otherwise would be seen on the media. The second half then would show the perspective from the US side instead of Z-Man’s perspective of running. The purpose of the second half is to tie the audience into the emotional fatigue of the soldiers in trying to find Z-Man and failing. Until finally, they do, and they blow him up. A final clip of Z-Man having a drink and toasting the future success of the JIhad could be a nice flourish as the bomb guides in on a tv mounted camera.

The military has soldiers trained in reporting, CGI, production, orchestration, filming. THey don’t need Hollywood. They just need Bush’s authorization.

The most optimistic end result would be this. A person watching propaganda film version 1, would feel frustration and anger at Z-Man’s free romp through human beings with faces, feelings, and families. The second half would give them satisfaction, a satisfaction nobody got after seeing hostages freed by Iran, as they see Z-Man scared and running, the prey instead of the predator. The denument would be his death.

Version 2, would give them the same emotions in Part 1, but would give them a double dose of frustration, rage, and empathy as they see US soldiers attempt to get Z-Man. The emotional catharsis at the end, would be twice as potent.

TS is betting that the military got it wrong. I’ll bet otherwise. But it isn’t as simple as that, really. The media is waging a disinformation campaign, and people should really understand what that means. When they report that Saddam is dead, or even that he might have died, this is disinformation designed to demoralize you. It gets your hopes up, then squashes it. So the next time you hear something like it, you won’t ever feel as uplifted as you would the original time. Boy crying wolf is an obvious disinformation operation.

When the media reports or hints or implies that Z-Man might have been harmed or captured or killed, this is disinformation that has a corrosive effect upon the morale of those who watch it. The military went through this when they tried to get Saddam. There were lots of false starts, their Intel branch had to rework the entire description of Saddam’s family structure from the ground up. It was like trying to write a family tree of the God Father by watching every 1 second out of every 60 seconds. Hard brutal work. Lots of times they searched houses and Saddam escaped by minutes. The military, because of the discipline they have, are trained to handle this kind of demoralization. Civilians are not. Civilians get their hopes up. When the media reports that the Miners Trapped Under a Cavein were alive…. well let’s just say that disinformation is disinformation, regardless of whether it was intended as such.

You can’t devastate someone’s hopes if they don’t have any. So you have to give them something to hope for, then crush it. The media does this almost unconsciously, as when they reported the Miners as alive when they were really dead.

The emotional and propaganda impact of the President’s announcement will do little to effect civilian morale. You can tell, because some people here were wishing for something different to be said.

There are other things you could do, you know, other than propaganda films and changing the words of the President, to boost morale. 5 days before this for example, the President could have announced that there was an amnesty deal that was being talked about concerning Z-Man. Imagine what people would have felt. Depressed? Perhaps. Enraged? Possibly. Disappointed and disgusted? Of course. Doubt in the Iraqi’s abilities and morality? Most certainly.

Then 5 days later, Z-Man dies. Emotinal catharisis perhaps?

The timing need not be exact, they didn’t know when they would get close. But they knew they were getting close. General Pace kept saying months ago, that they were getting closer to Z-Man on interviews. Presumably nobably believed him,b ut the President should have. If I was a betting man, I would have betted on the military as I am now.

Create disinformation, create news items that the media will report because they want it to be true. This time, the goal is to depress civilian morale, in order for Z-man’s death to have its maximum effect.

This is how you boaster and support civilian morale in warfare, this is how you stay the course, and this is how you bring unity in war. But Bush won’t lie or deceive people purposefully, and my disinformation and propaganda methods require both to be present.
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Check out the comments at blackfive.com. The military is throwing a party or will soon. Retired military and active duty. The Iraqis are perhaps even more joyous. This is the man that they saw as eluding their justice, this is the man that was the face and hand behind the deaths of their children and women.

The point that the so called “multiculturalists” are in fact parochial, is very apt. I realized this once I had studied Japanese culture, and started using some of it online and the fake liberals would come back with charges of brutality, violence, and etc. towards my character. A simple comparison with how multiculturalists treat other cultures, filled in the gaps.

A real multicultural system takes in the strengths of a foreign culture and dilutes the weaknesses with a base solution. This creates a hybrid stronger than the individual component cultures added together.

The rednecks aren’t on the Right anymore, to me. They have somehow teleported. This ain’t an American thing either. Just take a look at my recent blog post about Probligo to see that Australians, New Zealander’s and the rest of the West is equally affected by parochialism.

True cosmopolitanism in a person is a trait worth its weight in gold. In this sense, the military is much much more cosmopolitan than the French, the UN, ABC/CBS/AP, or Hollywood are. Marines usually have tours in Japan, Korea, Europe, Philliphines, and more. They learn culture and people face to face, powered by full immersion. The Iraq experience has broadened this, because combat presents a new motivation factor for the soldiers to get to know the people they are stationed with.

There is a lot of contempt from the Left, the fake liberals, and Hollywood against the military for being classless, tasteless, and village orientated brutes. Crude caricatues of high society material, they may think.

But the truely self-confident person, a person who is true to himself, feels no contempt for his inferiors and no envy for his superiors. For he or she is centered, and content, and the rages of passion and emotion can no longer pull at that person as the winds of fate dictate. A martial arts application, from the East.
# Ymarsakar Says:
June 8th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
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In response to Laer.

I knew nothing about the military except what I saw while watching Black Hawk Down, on 9/11. Zero. Well, if you don’t count all those episodes Hollywood produced for tv, which showed the military arresting, brutalizing, and oppressing civilians who just wanted to be “free” you know.

David Weber, John Ringo, Sun Tzu, hours spent a few weeks there or here studying the Civil War and other historical wars, catching various programs on the History Channel, have contributed now after 5 years, to me, an above average understanding of military affairs.

Just reading Sun Tzu provided no real understanding, just as when I first read Romeo and Juliet I did not understand the full impact or tragedy. There has to be other things you have to know first, to fully comprehend such things as what Sun Tzu wrote about. Such a thing as simple as “it is best to win wars without fighting” becomes infinitely complex when you try to apply it, as Clausewitz noticed. All simple things in war, become hard due to friction or otherwise known as the fog of war.

Knowing the ranks of the Marines and the Navy and the Army, those things are superficial. Insurgent warfare is not even conventional war, which means Clausewitz did not cover it, however Sun Tzu did. His wars back then were so old it had never had a “convention” to obey. The media faces an onion effect which gets harder and harder as they reach the core. First they have to understand the military, then they have to understand strategy, tactics, and logistics. Then they have to combine it into an understanding of conventional warfare, either infantry or armored column warfare. Then they have to translate this into insurgency warfare, which is neither here or there.

Military Science is not an advanced degree for nothing. Clausewitz’s final work was so huge, I haven’t even started in on it yet.

But al-Zarqawi was mourned in Anbar province.

“This a great loss for all the Sunnis,” 40-year-old Abid al-Duleimi said. “If they killed al-Zarqawi, more than one al-Zarqawi will replace him.”

One thing the media is competent at, and it is propaganda. You don’t need military science to know how to use propaganda and deception. You can depress people without knowing how to kill as well, even if the effects are the same.

Morale is the key, it is the Keystone to the ability to win wars without having to fight, kill, lay siege, or squander your resources. Break the enemy’s morale, and the fight is over. If the morale of your forces are broken, you might as well give up since your soldiers definitely have.

Because the media knows propaganda, PR, deception, and glitz, they know how to affect the morale of the American people. But the media has no knowledge of military affairs, so they do NOT know how to affect the morale of insurgents or of the enemy. Thus, the media, which is sort of like a bully, picks on the weaker more available target rather than the tough, dangerous, gang member.
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# Ymarsakar Says:
June 9th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

The way I see it, jg, is that the blogosphere is fighting a true guerrila war, cell based and hit and run, against the legacy media’s bigger more powerful propaganda appartus.

The blogosphere is the underdog, the legacy media the occupation forces. The truth is more complex, because it encompasses every single individual conscience and molecule of matter in the known universe. So what you have is like 2 wars on two different metaphysical planes of existence, fighting on two different fronts.

You have the propaganda war, where the enemy has the upper hand. Then you have the actual war, the killing and the blowing up of people, where the United States and our allies have the advantages of training, nerve, skills, wealth, firepower, technology, and size.

When people tell you that the “enemy” is so weak and what not, because we have bombs and they can only use suicide bombers, they’re just using another deception ploy.

The reason why the full might of the United States is taking 3 to 4 years to crush an insurgency in a nation with the pop of 25 mil, is because of what Napoleon said. Morale is to the physical, as is 3 is to 1. Full understanding of that requires some context.

To take it literally, it takes 3 hits with an axe to equal one successful hit on someone’s mind. The mind will break under one hit, the body will break under 3. So now you know. If the enemy has the advantage in morale manipulation, then regardless of how much conventional firepower we have, we have to be 3 times as good. We have to hit them 3 times for every 1 time they hit us. And amazingly enough, the US military does it. Not only that, but they exceed the minimum quota of victories.

This reminds me of the Peloponesian War, if i hadn’t mentioned this here before. Sparta had an elite phalanx force, while Athens had a superior Navy. Sparta only beat Athens, when Sparta beat the Athenian navy with a spartan built navy. To cut the story short.

The US will win, absolutely, once we gain the advantage in the propaganda war. The terroists will never, never, gain the advantage in the conventional war. Because guerrilas and terroists, never win, until they can build a conventional military force that can beat off the enemy. The United States Revolutionary Guerrilas lead by Washington, did just that. So what they want, is just to kick our conventional forces out, so they don’t have to fight them, cause they know they can never beat us at that warfare. So we have to leave, for them to win.

Now let’s apply this to the blogosphere and the propaganda war. If the terroists and the insurgents can’t win unless they can somehow get rid of our conventional force, then this applies to the propaganda war as well when the US is the underdog.

We must either get rid of the mSM propaganda apparatus, or we need to become superior at propaganda than the MSM and terroists combined.

That is the winning strategy, reduced down to fundamentals that removes any need to have a military background. It explains the why, in a way that is different than saying “stay the course” or “we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up”.

Bush is emphasizing the third option I did not mention. You can use shock troops to fight your wars for you, conventional or propaganda based, morale or physical. Bush is betting that the Iraqis can fight both the terroists propaganda wise and conventional wise. Bush is right. But America isn’t going to win the war on terrorism without doing what I have described here. Winning Iraq is one battle amongst a sea of battles. It is D-Day, it is a toe-hold in enemy territory.