War / Peace

Joseph Mailander of the Martini Republic weblog wonders if the U.S. government is "blog trolling" in Iraq: "touting the 'right' messengers with a mix of above-board, official recognition and below-board, ideology-based, sustained pump-priming, to generate a following for propagandistic messengers far beyond their natural level of interest." IraqTheModel, featuring two brothers in Baghdad, has become popular to the point that the brothers are touring the U.S., meeting President Bush and other prominent pro-war figures.

"In the end, the war in Iraq did not have the decisive impact on the election that many had expected," Michael Massing writes in the New York Review of Books. Why? Massing suggests that the American public may not have been "aware of just how bad things had gotten in Iraq." Of the many factors that shielded Americans from the "most brutal realities of Iraq," Fox News stands out. "The most striking feature of its coverage of the war in Iraq was, in fact, its lack of coverage," Massing writes.

Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists are winning the propaganda war against the United States, according to a new report by the Defense Science Board, a high-level Pentagon panel. "American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies," the report states. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. ...

Kevin Sites, the cameraman who filmed a U.S. Marine shooting a wounded prisoner in Fallujah, has written a detailed and powerful account, addressed to the soldiers, of what he saw and his decision to release the footage. "This week I've even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist," he writes. "Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I've gone to play it straight down the middle. ... .