Tried to post this as a comment over at Free Range International but experienced technical difficulties, so I emailed it to Tim and Cannonette was reading over my shoulder and told me to post it on my blog, so here it is:
The question the MSM should be asking, if they were capable of independent thought or even thinking clearly about the important issues of the day, is will Afghanistan become our longest war, and if so, why?
The MSM ask the questions they choose thinking clearly about one important issue of the day, which is how to survive and maintain their power as propagandists and arbiters of what the citizens are allowed to know and how the citizens should feel about what they are allowed to know.
Operation Enduring Freedom began on 7 October 2001, eight years and nine months ago, to destroy the Al Qaeda network inside Afghanistan along with the Taliban regime which refused President Bush’s demand to turn the plotters of 9/11 over to us. Most of what we went there to do was indeed accomplished, but Tora Bora went badly, bin Laden escaped, America was denied a satisfying, clear-cut revenge for 9/11, and we were sucked into an Information Operations briar patch. Both As-Sahab, the media arm of al Qaeda, and the American MSM, the media arm of the Democrats, planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to American audiences in order to influence our emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of our governments, organizations, groups, and individual citizens.
After Tora Bora, Afghanistan’s strategic criticality to America was recognized by many as marginal, but it was the only war we had at the time and manufacturing consent for limited land wars in Asia with limited objectives, limited resources, and limited return on investment was a perception management task the Bush Administration was not up to. Saddam’s misfortune was that we could logistically support major military operations against him, and we could convince a lot of people that Saddam had been asking for it for a long time, so we satisfied the blood lust of the American people with Saddam’s neck in a noose and relegated OEF to a side show for the Coalition of the Unwilling to Join Us In Iraq.
We haven’t been “in it to win it” almost since we got there and there is no good way to strategically communicate inconvenient truths like that.
Civilian Irregular Information Defense Group 