Militaristic states and their propaganda warfare

(Picture from blogger citizen of Mosul. Dead children loaded on truck after US raid March 15)

U.S. and Iraqi forces today launched the largest air assault operation since the invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago, the U.S. military said this afternoon. More than 50 aircraft are involved in Operation "Swarmer", supporting more than 1,500 Iraqi and U.S. troops near Samarra, about 75 miles north of Baghdad.

Only 22 per cent of the American population believe that the Iraq war is winnable. So what do you do as a military planner, seeing that the "Shock and Awe" bomb raid came to nothing? - Start a new one of course. And knock sense into the doubting public's dumb brains.

You start a large scale offensive, operation "Swarmer", as it is called. - To hunt terrorists!

How do you go about convincing the populations in the countries of the "coalition of the willing"? By telling lies about what is going on. Because the truth is much too stark. It doesn' t go to say that a lot of the "enemy combatants" are not terrorists, - but rather insurgents, or maybe even freedom fighters. That apart from the Kurds in the north, the iraquis do not support the occupation.

The Danes are exposed to the same set of lies. On Danish national TV tonight the Danish military leadership in Baghdad said that the iraqui troops were more and more up to the task of fighting the "terrorists"; the Danish correspondent in Washington had been filled with propaganda from the press conferences in Washington so he could inform the viewers that Operation "Swarmer" is necessary to clean up this difficult part of the Sunni triangle with all the sectarian strife. After all the media coverage during the afternoon and evening one wonders: Why don't people understand that we're going to win this war?

Quote from Reuters March 15:
Police and witnesses said 11 members of one family were killed in a U.S. raid overnight in Ishaqi, a town in Saddam's home province north of Baghdad. The U.S. military said two women and a child died as troops arrested an al Qaeda militant.
A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged.
Television footage showed the bodies of five children, two men and four women in the Tikrit morgue. One infant had a gaping head wound. All the children seemed younger than school age.
"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.
"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured.