Before Abbottabad: hunting AQ leaders (merged thread)

[jcustis]

Aha!

From what I can see, a large part of the personalized rhetoric was aimed at the home audience, not the foreign one.

So is there a lesson to be learned there as well? Is home consumption strictly home consumption, and do we need to think deeply about what goes out across the airwaves, youtube, and liveleak? I'm trying to come up with a few Cold War analogies about perception vs. reality. That's what really started this idea.

[Steve Blair]

We always need to consider perception versus reality, especially with IO-type operations. One good Cold War parallel could be the rhetoric about "wars of national liberation." By seeing every insurgency as Communist backed or inspired, we backed ourselves into supporting some rather questionable folks, and gave the Soviets a free hand when it came to propaganda.

[marct]

Hi JC,

So is there a lesson to be learned there as well? Is home consumption strictly home consumption, and do we need to think deeply about what goes out across the airwaves, youtube, and liveleak? I'm trying to come up with a few Cold War analogies about perception vs. reality. That's what really started this idea.

Oh, it's definitely a perception vs. reality dichotomy . I'm not sure, however, that the Cold War has that many good analogies for today's communications environment.

First off, I would suggest that there really is little difference between a "home" and a "non-home" information market - at least in the sense of them being reasonably isolated and, hence, amenable to differing messages.

Second, I suspect that no "unified" message strategy, a least in the conventional sense, will work - there are just too many alternate venues for dissenting voices to appear.

Third, and coming out of these two, I would suggest that there has to be a fair degree of decentralization of content production but grouped around as specific philosophical or ideological stance. Something along the lines of "We will track down the irhabi responsible for 9/11", followed by a tiny explanation of the word irhabi, and a call for Islamic states to support the suppression of them. Leave individuals out of it and cast it as a general world problem, even for the home audience.

Just some thoughts off the top of my head...

Marc