......Scholars, specialists, and the press5 have paid increased attention of late to the enormous effort Iislamist groups put into producing a range of media materials (particularly, although not exclusively, on the Iinternet) designed to recruit, mobilize, instruct, and persuade. This attention is clearly warranted Lieutenant Colonel Terry Guild, a U.S. Army officer specializing in information operations, put it simply: “[The enemy’s] media infrastructure is quick, it’s collaborative, it’s virtual, it’s global, it’s technical, and it’s getting better all the time.” However, this work has consistently ignored a key element of much of this material. While it is certainly true these materials serve an important role for the movement’s internal purposes, they also represent a sophisticated story-telling ability, producing texts that can serve more than one rhetorical purpose at a time. For many of these groups (although certainly not all) their center of gravity is U.S. public opinion. Certainly this is true for many groups fighting coalition forces in Iiraq. Iin everything they do in terms of the creation of persuasive texts, they will have that audience at least partially in mind. Not every persuasive text is meant to influence audiences in the Iislamic world. The U.S. military should be aware of the ramifications enemy propaganda material has for U.S. domestic opinion when considering how to respond to it.....
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