Information War Games with Live Ammunition

It's the battle for hearts and minds, not necessarily in that order.

For your consideration, Paul Krugman:

Amid everything else that's going wrong in the world, here's one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.

At one level, this shouldn't be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don't like have been established, whether it's the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.

But it's dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.

Here's how the process works.

First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts.

Sometimes the officials simply lie. "The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality," Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave...

Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It's hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.

Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980's-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)

Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.

And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren't de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?

The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it's not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the "good news" from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration's favor.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history...

It's all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past," he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?

Dr. Krugman, I think you're presuming you live in a democratic nation with a free press.

Xan has the current Israeli-Lebanon conflagration right:

The Israelis' ...current joyous leap into the Tar Baby of south Lebanon all the more inexplicable. And why for chrissakes all the bombing around Beirut, from whence no Hezbollah rockets whatever flow?

Maybe, just maybe, that isn’t the war they’re fighting. From The Beeb:

"From mass targeting of mobile phones with voice and text messages to old-fashioned radio broadcasts warning of imminent attacks, Israel is deploying a range of old and new technologies in Lebanon as part of the psychological operations (“psyops”) campaign supplementing its military attacks."

Nothing terribly new so far… but read on:

"The Israeli newspaper Maariv on Sunday reported the appearance of a website called All 4 Lebanon which offered payment for tip-offs from Lebanese citizens 'that could help Israel in the fight against Hezbollah'.

"According to Maariv, the site, with content in Arabic, English and French, had been set up by Israeli intelligence."

Still nothing that radical. Fake websites are about as rare as squash bugs, used by commercial interests, politicians, and angry MySpace customers. But now we start getting into some very foily terrain:

"On Friday, residents of southern Lebanon reported receiving recorded messages on their mobile phones from an unknown caller.

"The speaker identified himself as an Israeli and warned people in the area to leave their homes and head north. [snip]

"Inquiries by Lebanon’s communications ministry revealed that the calls had come from exchanges in Italy and Canada, but had originated in Israel."

And finally we get way, way out past where the tinfoil suffers metal fatigue:

"According to an unconfirmed report by Egypt’s Middle East News Agency, Israel managed on Sunday “to intercept the satellite transmissions of Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel for the third successive day, replacing it with Israeli transmissions that reportedly showed Hezbollah command sites and rocket launching pads which Israel claimed it has raided”.

"Replacing a TV station’s picture with output you want the audience to see is more difficult to achieve than jamming."

Put all together like this and we start to see a Test To Destruction of the total information infrastructure.