Headline fatigue and al Qaeda
By Steven Den Beste Posted in User Blogs — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
What are the drawbacks for al Qaeda of the fact that the western press is the "arm of decision" in this war?
Stephen Green writes
about how the press is the "arm of decision" in the current war. Given
the nature of terrorist campaigns, that's definitely true, and in some ways it's
clear that our decision makers haven't really dealt with this aspect of the war
as well as they probably should have.
But for the terrorists and Islamists, there's a distinct drawback in this
kind of war: headline fatigue. Even given that the western press tends to be
more sympathetic to the terrorists than to western governments in the war, an
ongoing campaign of car bombings in Iraq eventually becomes boring and gets
consigned to the rear pages of the newspaper.
That means that the terrorists have to come up with increasingly spectacular
escapades in order to maintain the attention of the western press. A couple of
years ago the new innovation was video decapitations, but eventually the novelty
wore off.
But the other side of the coin of headline fatigue is revulsion. Increasingly
spectacular escapades become increasingly vile atrocities. They get the
headlines, alright, but repel more people than they attract. This week's bombing
in Amman is a good example of that; the reaction to it in Jordan was universally
extremely negative on the "Arab Street" and al Qaeda's apparent
anonymous-public spokesmen (online) found themselves trying to do spin and
damage control.
When publicity and mind-share are your only real weapons in a war, you
eventually become caught between the Scylla of boredom and obscurity and the
Charybdis of nearly universal aversion for you and your cause. This is often how
terrorist campaigns begin to wind down.
We've begun to see that in Iraq. Revulsion for the terrorists among the
Sunnis has led to more and more tips as to where the terrorists are hiding
and more and more captures/killings of high level people. Between "clean
out the snakes" operations like the current one in the upper Euphrates
River region, and ongoing low level operations based on tips in places like
Mosul, the terrorists have been suffering severe attrition.
That only exacerbates the boredom/aversion problem. As the best top-level
people get killed or captured, lower level people move up and take over. But
they're not as qualified or well trained, and either fail to operate
sufficiently spectacularly to keep getting headlines, or they botch their
choices of operations and commit increasingly grotesque atrocities which
polarize more and more people against them.
This is also a long term potential consequence of running a campaign with a
dispersed cell-based organization. If too many top level links get taken out,
then the organization disintegrates into a large number of independent groups
each of which runs the war as it sees fit. Any one of them which commits an
atrocity then contributes to the increasing revulsion for the lot of them.
It's becoming clear that when the music stops al Qaeda won't have anywhere to
sit down any longer. The US made the strategic decision to take the war to the
Arab world rather than to let the battlefield be the west. That's one of the
reasons for the invasion of Iraq.
Iraq was too central and too important for al Qaeda to ignore; it became the
central battlefield of the war. That meant al Qaeda increasingly targeted Arabs
and Muslims rather than westerners. And as the other factors described above
came into play, there were attacks in Saudi Arabia which led to a government
crackdown there, and now the attack in Amman. All of which have had the effect
of alienating the legendary "Arab Street" against al Qaeda.
Where will they get money and recruits in future? Where will there be safe
havens for them to hide their top commanders and to create training bases? Right
now the answer seems to be "Syria and Iran". Syria, however, seems to
be in big trouble recently and I think there's reason to hope that the Assad
government there will soon be history. That leaves Iran, and it's a real problem
which will have to be dealt with soon.
But in the mean time, Steve Green's point about the press being the arm of
decision is correct, but there are negative consequences of that for al Qaeda
which may work in our favor in the long run.
A war of press, publicity, and propaganda is a war of attrition.
Joyous to see you back, Mr. den Beste. Hoping your health is more than adequate and remains that way.
A comment that speaks to your topic of "headline fatigue" is what we see happening right now in France with the self-censorship of the media. They are not showing pictures of flaming cars because French news-people think that may inflame the "normal" population. This is exactly the same thing as American MSM has been doing for 4 years now with images of 9/11 being a no-no.
So that for Al-Queda, if they go too far in one direction like they've done in Jordan, they'll be denounced by the Arab Street. If they don't go far enough, they'll be ignored and suffer "headline fatigue". And if they go too far in the other direction, like they did with 9/11, they'll piss off America and be stomped on, and otherwise harried, chased, shot and bankrupted.
I'm really annoyed that our American media have decided that we're too dumb to see those pictures any more, and I also think it's probably not a wise decision to protect the French from the reality they are currently living with. This "protective lying" to shield the population is over and above the effects the media may or may not have on Al-Queda's efforts.
I have a bone to pick about something you mentioned in passing . . . Just kidding. :)
It is great to have you write about politics again. In case you haven't seen it, Austin Bay has a post that disusses how the Jordanian bombings became an Al Qaeda media nightmare, and I think it is a nice corolary to this post.
A big part of the attrition endurance on our end has been reaching the Junior Officers (JO's) and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO's) with the message that we can't allow ourselves to commit attrocities of any kind. Most of the NCO's I've worked with in the last year are great, they get it on a fairly deep level or at least are clear about the importance of serving the mission. Some are still unclear about how our mission needs to be carried out and why.
The idiots who forced Iraqi's into the river set the war back several months because they couldn't be bothered to do their jobs right for another hour. By not verifying the guilt of the detainees held or taking the time to transfer them to a holding facility or having the honesty to admit that they might have innocent people, our troops pushed a lot of credibility into the river.
At least this war we do not have a widespread attitude of "everybody is doing it, so it's OK". The emphasis on integrity is our best hope for victory in this war.
Your analysis is correct that headline fatigue and revulsion work against the Islamists in the majority, but Al'Qaeda is not necessarily playing to the majority. Zawahiri expressly states that the goal of the "propaganda by deed" is to reach a mere 5% of the Muslim youth. Comparing this objective to reality seems to indicate that Zawahiri is succeeding in what he and Osama set out to do.
Whether 5% is sufficient and whether propaganda by deed is a good strategy are valid questions ad deserve a systematic inquiry. Nevertheless, one might concede your analysis of Al'Qaeda's informational weakness and still hold the opinion that they will not be determinative in Al'Qaeda's defeat.
The underlying problem, for which we have relatively few answers, is the increasing self-identitification of young men according to their Muslimness, and the corollary universalization of grievances as Muslim grievances. This phenomenon is most prevalent in young Muslim men who have some level of interaction with the West (see Sayed Qutb's rejection of the West after his visit to America). This interaction heightens their awareness of global status (comparative failure), which then reinforces the jihadi imperative.
5%, linked and reinforced through the internet, is a formidable force. Al'Qaeda's influence overall may wax and wane with the media cycle, but the resolve of this group will not.
Which means the arm of decision is predominantly a Western arm. The danger is an admixture of Al'Qaeda's propaganda by deed with the feeling of Western guilt propagated by a cannabalistic media. Our narcissism is unusual in that, while we cannot pull ourselves away from the looking glass, it is a self-immolating fascination with abomination that keeps us rooted. Such self-disgust, reinforced by a media and academia that trade in it, are the only actors that can create the necessary environment for Western defeat. We may be periodically disturbed from our trance, through rioting or the occasional attack, and we may lash out in annoyance, but pulling ourselves away from self-obsession for any length of time is now almost impossible. How long before the roots take hold permanently? How long before our guilt, and the timid intertia it causes, transitions into decline?
Islamist terror is but one manifestation of rejectionist ideology--the most obvious and most visible (and therefore least problematic). The real danger comes from within. To withstand the inevitable viral assaults on our society indefinitely, we need to be bolstered by self-confidence and purpose--unfortunately, these are the virtues that are slowly being stripped away by our elite.
The cause in fact of a potential decline will be our academia, but the proximate cause will be an irresponsible and undiscerning media. Therefore, the media is a clear and present danger and must be engaged.
That 5% are useless if the other 95% are highly motivated to snitch to the police, and if the police and government are highly motivated to come down hard on that 5%.
Your points are well taken: that 5% cannot succeed against a motivated 95%, and that headline fatigue causes a flight to the macabre which then attrits the support of the fellow-traveler--a support necessary for a robust terrorist movement.
We should then fear not the macabre, but acts of ostensible revolution couched in language sure to hypnotize a vast segment of the disaffected, Marxist Left (riots in France, perhaps?). Islamists might not be nimble enough to manage this, though there are those in the West that try on their behalf (CAIR, e.g.).
I share Steven's optimism.
The IRA and the PLO and all the other notorious terror groups that sprouted up over the past few decades seemed to indicate that terror was a modern plague that we would all have to live with to one degree or another.
But Al Qaeda may be doing us all the favor of inducing a kind of world-wide terror fatigue which renders their tactics useless, if not outright counter-productive. We can only hope that future generations will regard Islamist terror in hindsight as a historical anachronism in the same vein as the notorious anarchist terrorists of the late nineteenth century.
You make some good points here, and I hope I don't seem like I am disagreeing with everything you say. I would like to make some points as well that I think will fill in where I think you are missing, rather than disagree with the points you have already made.
A 5% recruiting stock from a <vary large number of people> is still a formidable force if your goal is for a 'body a day, that's all we ask' campaign, as they are doing in Iraq. The goal here is not to defeat the Coalition forces, but to cause dissent at home. The 95% majority of Muslims that are not impacted can still look the other way because the victims are `infidels'.
On the Western front, ss long as the media is printing body counts and moonbat liberals denouncing the war, it is pressure on the forces of U.S. politics for them.
But when the media shows their recruiting videos, with someone shouting 'Allah Akbar' seconds before an IED takes out a Coalition truck, this may appeal to this 5% recruiting stock, but it does inhibit the efficiency of the overall strategic thrust. Even moonbat liberals get pissed off when they see fanatics taking out our troops, but indifferent muslims could care less because the victims involved are 'infidels'.
When the media prints about how they are killing muslims in Jordan, the Muslim reaction is much more profound. In this respect, the headlines dramatically work against Zawahiri and Co. because it has a good chance of turning the majority against the minority, instead of the indifference that they have enjoyed for the most part.
In the Media influence as a driving force, there are two fronts that are going on. Looking at it from a Zawahiri and Co. point of view, the balance of the war is dependent on the main front of negative reinforcement on the will and perceptions of the West, as you discuss. But it also depends on keeping the majority of Muslims off their back. As long as they can succeed with the latter, they can maintain the assault on the main front. If the majority of muslims turn on them, there is no hope for them. Their own cultural mechanisms can do more to change their behavior than us mere infidels.
Gotcha. Belligerant snarkiness is the tone to be aspired towards.
I can do that.
I am really glad to see you are writing again. I used to live for your essays (seriously).