Seeking comments on viral I/O video

[Bill Moore]

The impact of this particular video will probably be nil to minimal. However watching this right after reading the excellent article on "The Power of Political Mobilization" in Issue 7 of the SWJ, it really made me wonder if our military truely has enough strategic corporals to facilitate mobilizing the population to support our effort. While acts like this are mainly intended to entertain fellow soldiers and blow off stress, the reality, as we all know, is that they end up on places like U-Tube where the entire global population can download them, and then spin them to support their message. Look the American soldiers hate Muslims, they're not here to protect you, etc. Again this was clowning around, but it is one more straw on the camel's back in this IO war. While I agree with previous comments on political correctness impacting our operations, in this case I don't see this as PC comment, but rather a strategic argument on why we have the real the guys in occassionally, and explain the potential undesired 2d order effects.

bismark, while I don't deny Iranin meddling, don't forget the Iraqi military had MANPADS, and we sure as heck didn't even get close to securing 10% of their arms initially. The Iraqi insurgents don't need much support from outside nations in this area, but none the less they have received EFPs from some entity in Iran, and the level of sosphistication of some recent attacks indicate they received training from a capable special operations unit (most likely Iran). I do think the Iranina Special Operations is very capable, and this isn't just reflected in the performance of their surrogate force the Hezbollah, but I personally saw a counter terrorist unit I was training with who recently returned from training in Iran, and their skills were markedly improved. The soldiers who went there thought the training was some of the best they received.

Iran is obviously playing a political game of brinksmanship, but don't confuse the current regime with the regime that supported the atrocities in Lebanon. Motivations may be different now, and what would be interesting is to see why they think they have us by the balls now, thus can (and so far have) get away with their support of various factions in Iraq? If nothing else they are survivors, so I'm not 100% convinced that the support coming from Iran is authorized by the highest levels of government. They want to stick around for awhile. Like a lot of Middle Eastern Governments, they may not have enough political strength to bring their subordinates to heel.