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Monday, February 26, 2007

Weapons of Mass Influence

Today being the 14th anniversary of the first World Trade Center attack, it's sobering to see the inroads Al Qaeda has made, especially when it comes to influencing popular opinon. New Jersey Republican Congressman Jim Saxton discusses how they've accomplished this.
Yes, it is true: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many other Western decisionmakers and political leaders have been influenced about Iraq. This has been done intentionally through a brand of conflict called "fourth generation" warfare.

The al-Qaeda led coalition recognized from the start they had no hope of defeating us on the conventional battlefield. All they had to do was to look at the results of the first Iraq war in 1991 or the short conventional war in Iraq in 2003.

The al Qaeda-led coalition had to ask itself this: how can we, a relatively weak conventional military force, outgunned and outmanned by a technologically superior giant, hope to win a military and political victory in Iraq? Their answer: by making it so costly in terms of bad news, too many dollars, and loss of life that their superior enemy, the United States, would decide the toll was too high and would leave.

Retired Marine Col. Tom Hammes best describes this in his book "The Sling and the Stone": "Fourth generation warfare uses all available networks -- political, economic, social and military -- to convince the enemies' political decisionmakers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit."

In the case of Iraq, the al Qaeda-led coalition has used all these networks and added one more: the Western media. Each morning when the American people awake, including Mrs. Pelosi, the news comes in from Iraq. Al Qaeda has taken care that each event in Iraq -- be it political, economic, social and/or military -- is deliberately created for the purpose of generating "bad news." Let me explain how.
Read it all.

UPDATE: A Blog For All has more on the Battle for Ground Zero and Michelle Malkin notes the forgotten anniversary, February 26, 1993.

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