Global Research
PSYOPs, “Media Warfare” and the “Weaponization of Information” in Iraq
Iraqis are once again being
made irrelevant in a war of spin as the Western media manipulates fact
and narrative to support US action in Iraq, writes Ross Caputi.
Iraqis are once again being made irrelevant in a war of spin as the
Western media manipulates fact and narrative to support US action in
Iraq. Debates have been raging over what the US should do about ISIS.Note the actors in this story: The US, ISIS, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, and other regional leaders. Note who is missing from this story: the Iraqi civilian population.
Has the question ‘What do Iraqis want?’ come up even once? Along with an overly simple narrative of the ascendence and role of the anti-Maliki fighters in Iraq, the assumption that the US has a right to decide what the best course of action for Iraq will be has gone unchallenged in the media.
Part of the problem is a
cultural failure on our part to respect the political aspirations of
Iraqis. What Iraqis want more than anything right now—and these are
among the few goals that cross sectarian boundaries in Iraq—is
independence and democracy. Iraqis want to manage their own affairs and
solve their own problems without the interference and condescending
tutelage of Washington and Tehran. Yet we are so quick to assume that
the US ought to do something, that the US must do something, and that
Iraqis need our “help” that we blunder forward with foreign policy that
takes as its starting point an unquestioned belief in the US’s right to
take military action in other peoples’ countries whenever we decide it
is justified.
Ross Caputi, giving testimony in the Iraq Commission during the IADL congress in Brussels on 16 April 2014,
Another part of the problem is
our collective failure to come to terms with the lies our government
told to us about the US-led occupation. Our misunderstanding of our past
actions in Iraq is bleeding into our confusion over the present.
Connecting the Past to the Present
I had one source of information
while I was a Marine in Fallujah in 2004—my chain of command. It never
occurred to me that they would be actively manipulating the information
they were feeding me, the other men in my unit, and the journalists
imbedded with us. This was a naive assumption that could have cost me my
life. Although I survived, others around me did not.
There was a conscious decision
made by the US military to have Western journalists embedded with us
during the 2nd siege of Fallujah. The US military believed that the reason they lost the 1st siege of Fallujah was
due to their failure to control the media’s reporting of that
operation. They accused Al Jazeera, the lone international media crew in
Fallujah at the time, for releasing false and exaggerated reports about
civilians killed by US military actions, which created the
international outrage and political pressure that forced the US to
retreat out of Fallujah and hand control of the city over to the
Fallujah Brigade. Although Al Jazeera’s reports were corroborated by
several other sources, and their projected civilian death toll later
proved to be accurate (over 749 civilian deaths),
the US military insisted on believing that Al Jazeera was invited into
Fallujah by the “insurgents” and was actively conspiring with them as
their propaganda organ.
The US military then engaged in a
campaign of “shaping operations”, which consisted of IO’s (Information
Operations), PSYOPs (Psychological Operations), and air strikes to
better control the battlefield for the next siege of Fallujah. The
centerpiece of this campaign was the PSYOP to exaggerate the role of Abu Musab al Zarqawi,
the alleged leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, who the US military claimed was
using Fallujah as a military base from which he was launching attacks
all across Iraq. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, then spokesman for the
Joint Task Force, claimed that the goal of the PSYOP was to “leverage
xenophobia” in Iraq and turn the Iraqi population against foreign
Mujahideen. Beyond creating a false existential threat that was used to
justify the US’s 2nd assault on Fallujah, the lies about Zarqawi’s
presence in Fallujah also placed an impossible condition for peace on
the people of Fallujah. The US and Iraqi Interim Government demanded
that the leadership in Fallujah hand Zarqawi over to them or face an all
out military assault on their city, even though no one in Fallujah had
ever even seen Zarqawi in their city and there is nothing in the way of
real evidence to suggest that this man ever set foot in Fallujah.
Yet this lie quickly became a
conventional wisdom and my unit was instructed that we were going into
Fallujah to liberate the city from Zarqawi’s forces. Half way into the
operation, my command pulled us aside and said that they had just
received an intelligence report that Zarqawi was just a few blocks a way
and that he was wounded in the leg. They encouraged us to keep fighting
and to stay motivated, because victory was near.
Somewhere between 4,000 to 6,000 civilians were killed and 63 American lives were lost in the course of this operation.
Yet it was the loss of American
lives that received the focus in the Western media, and the atrocities
that we committed against civilians went unreported. This was not an
accident, nor a matter of perspective taking. Reports of civilian deaths
were regarded as IO (Information Operation) victories for the
“insurgents”. Lieutenant General Metz, Commanding General of the
Multi-National Corps-Iraq at the time of the 2nd siege, explained that,
“IO challenges”, such as reports of civilian casualties, were things
that “we could anticipate and for which we could plan. We took control
of the hospital the evening before the main attack on Fallujah, removing
it from the enemy’s IO platform.” The Fallujah General Hospital was
considered to be yet another propaganda organ for those we considered to
be our enemy. Thus, one of the very first objectives of this operation
was to take control of the hospital, which Professor Noam Chomsky has
explained to me was a “major war crime”.
In preparation for these IO
challenges, Coalition Forces decreed that only embedded journalists
would be allowed inside Fallujah for the 2nd siege. Also, the “media
commission” in Iraq, which was established by Order 65 of Bremer’s 100
Orders, sent out a warning to all journalists in Iraq that they should “stick to the government line on the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action.”
Journalists who tried to enter Fallujah without being embedded with
Coalition Forces were detained. This time around 91 journalists were
embedded with Coalition units inside Fallujah, whereas in the 1st siege
there were none. The role of these Western reporters was to “[offer] a
rebuttal” to the enemy’s IOs. Only this time around, there was no media
crew in Fallujah that was sympathetic to the plight of Fallujans.
Thus, the deaths of Americans
dominated the headlines, and our operation was labeled a “liberation” in
the media without any competing narrative. Fallujans were effectively
silenced. No one ever asked for their perspective on our assault of
their city, or asked if they really felt like they were being liberated.
Even something as violent and as objective their deaths was dismissed,
in the sense that their reality did not matter, and was only
acknowledged as IOs from the enemy.
The Weaponization of Information
The “shaping operations” that
characterized the 2nd siege of Fallujah are not anecdotal. The
dehumanizing ideological climate that these operations created, where
information is weaponized and truth becomes irrelevant, is still killing
Iraqis. The lies and myths that live on from this period are still at
play, the least of them being: the presumed legitimacy of the US-led
occupation, the illegitimacy of the Iraqi resistance (and the
exaggerated role of al Qaeda in the Iraqi resistance), and the facade of
US state building in Iraq.
Journalists today are attempting
to draw a direct, chronological line from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS. Facts that complicate this
narrative—such as the PSYOP on Zarqawi’s role in Iraq, or the fact
that ISIS has undergone such significant changes its
organization structure, ideology, and political goals that the only
feature it currently shares with its ancestor al-Qaeda in Iraq is
cruelty—are conveniently omitted.
Furthermore, the US’s role in creating the current crisis in Iraq is
lost in an a-historical narrative that takes as its starting point the
moment Iraqi security forces were kicked out of Mosul. However, if we
back up in history a year and a half to the nonviolent protest movement that swept Iraq,
which went by the name of the Iraqi Spring, it becomes clear how
Maliki’s violently oppressive and sectarian policies turned a nonviolent
movement into an armed rebellion, and how the US armed him every step
of the way.It was the tribes in Fallujah and Ramadi who first picked up weapons against Maliki when he sent troops to attack their protest camps in December of 2013. ISIS came later, and an alliance of convince was formed between them and the tribal fighters in Anbar province, despite the fact that these groups had totally different political goals. Two of the Iraqi Spring protestors’ main demands was an end to sectarianism in Iraq and an end to all discussion of dividing Iraq up into autonomous federal regions. Even though federalism and sectarianism are the main political platform of ISIS, these differences were brushed aside when ISIS and the tribal fighters joined forces against Maliki.
The US then increased its supply
of military weapons, including Apache attack helicopters and Hellfire
missiles and other forms of military assistance, to “help” the
Iraqi military “in the battle to uproot Islamic fighters from Ramadi
and Fallujah”. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki then used these weapons to
conduct an indiscriminate campaign of bombing in residential
neighborhoods of Fallujah and other Sunni cities, which has been so
indiscriminate and so sectarian in nature—complete with the use of
experimental “barrel bombs”, a tactic adopted from Bashar al-Assad’s assault on Aleppo—that it approaches the legal definition of a “genocide”. Since the start of this campaign in December, 433 civilians have been killed in Fallujah and over 1633 have been wounded.
Iraqi Solutions to an American Problem
The US is currently presenting
itself as a solution to a conflict that it has elicited and nurtured
every step of the way. Even the voices in Washington that want to get
rid of Maliki accept the premise that the US is a legitimate actor in
Iraqi affairs and they avoid discussion of US accountability for current
and past violence.
In President Obama’s statement on June 19th, he declared that ISIS “poses a threat to the Iraqi people”. Does it matter that ISIS is actually just one participant in a loose coalition of militias that have come to embody the hopes and aspirations of the Sunni population of Iraq, or that Shia organizations support this revolution as well? Does it matter that there are militias within this coalition that are willing to rebuke ISIS for its sectarianism? Does it matter that 500 residents of Mosul fled their city, not out of fear of ISIS, but out of fear of Maliki’s reprisal?
Does it matter that Obama’s decision to continue supporting the Iraqi
security forces is akin to choosing sides in a sectarian war?
Furthermore, does it matter that Obama’s plan to seek a diplomatic
solution with “Iraqi leaders and the countries in the region” renders
the Iraqi population as passive spectators in their own society? Or will
the Western media continue to let Obama speak for Iraqis and parrot his
misleading statements uncritically?
The Western media has created a
narrative of the recent events in Iraq that omits the US’s role in
facilitating a genocide against the Sunnis, and positions the Iraqi
population as an irrelevant actor in any possible solution to this
crisis.
Furthermore, our collective failure to come to terms with our own
history in Iraq is leading us towards policy decisions that will only
result in more civilian deaths, more deeply entrenched ethnic and
religious divisions, and a weak and divided Iraq, dominated by foreign
powers. US interference in Iraq has done nothing but bring death and
hardship to the Iraqi people for over a decade, and continued
interference will be no different. The US has no role to play in
Iraq—not a military one or a diplomatic one—apart form giving
reparations to the Iraqi people for destroying their society. We must
learn to respect the right of Iraqis to self-determination and
independence.
Ross Caputi is
a former US marine, having served from 2003 to 2006. He took part in
the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004. He became openly critical
of the military and was discharged in 2006. Ross holds an MA in
linguistics and is the founding director of the Justice for Fallujah Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah
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www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
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Copyright © Ross Caputi, BRussells Tribunal, 2014
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