You Have to Have a Villain

It's the first rule of any action movie. And of war:

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

This is not unprecedented at all. We know that the toppling of the Saddam statue, still lauded as a great moment by conservative bloggers, was a psy-ops stunt orchestrated by the US. The Army admitted it.

And now we find out that Zarqawi wasn't as central to the fight in Iraq as we've been told. Well, we've known that too. Jihadi fighters are a miniscule portion of the insurgency. In a way this psy-ops campaign has probably paid off, if the stories of protests against Zarqawi and internal fights amongst the insurgency are to be believed.

But this of course undermines the quality of the news of success in this fight. Zarqawi is largely irrelevant right now. John Kerry is right in saying we're fighting the third war in Iraq now: not one against Saddam, not one against Al Qaeda, but a protracted, undeclared civil war, where we stand on the sidelines while Shiites and Sunnis charge at each other's throats. It's completely irresponsible for the Pentagon to be amping up the significance of Zarqawi, because it provides cover for the real problems in Iraq.

Apparently the Pentagon gave a New York Times reporter a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi to Ayman al-Zawahiri, when a letter which is now widely seen as a fake:

One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

With the group currently in charge, not only can't you trust what they're saying about our enemies, you can't trust that the enemies are even actually the enemies. George Orwell was a prophet.