WASHINGTON, 7 December 2004 — Two photo-rich summaries of the battle of Fallujah — one produced by the US military in Iraq, the other by an anonymous American blogger — highlight how the terrain in such counterinsurgency fights can be as much psychological as physical.
Both presentations have gained increasing Internet audiences recently and attempt to convey, among other things, the suffering imposed on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah.
That is where similarities end, however. The military’s presentation depicts the fight for Fallujah as a liberation of a city from the insurgents. The web log posts far more graphic wire service and other photos, and tends to point the finger of blame for civilian suffering at the military.
Judging by the reaction of several soldiers and military experts, a comparison of the two presentations shows, among other things, how the might of the US military can be matched by a single blogger working part time.
Public affairs officers at the top US military headquarters in Baghdad produced the 59-page Microsoft PowerPoint presentation titled, “Telling the Fallujah Story to the World.’’ It is the first such effort distributed by the headquarters, said one of its creators, Army Maj. Scott R. Bleichwehl.
It comes as the US military is trying to step up “strategic communications’’ in Iraq, after being heavily criticized, internally and by outside experts, for failing to get its message to the Iraqi people and the world in general.
The military briefing, an electronic slide show that has rocketed around the Internet over the last week, can be read at Soldiers for the Truth (www.sftt.org) and other websites, frequently with comments such as, “Why is the DOD not getting this information to the media?’’ Another version of the briefing was released Friday by the Pentagon and is reachable at www.dod.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20041203-1721.html.
Charles Krohn, a former army public affairs official who worked with the US occupation authority in Iraq, said he suspects the presentation is directed at American audiences. He said the United States has failed to get out its message in Iraq, and has not even appeared to want to do so. “How we can invade a country and eject its government without letting the people who live there know what we were doing and why is a mystery to me,’’ he said.
The US military briefing focuses on violations of the law of war by the insurgents. It states that of 100 mosques in Fallujah, 60 were used to hide weapons or as defensive positions. A map shows nine locations of bomb-making factories and comments that roadside bombs are “the insurgents’ principal instrument of attack on innocent civilians.’’ It also shows a van whose side panels have been “removed and filled with PE-4,’’ a kind of plastic explosive.
Another slide shows a photograph of bloody handprints on a wall, and blood on walls, presumably evidence of torture or murder. There also is other evidence of hostage-taking presented.
“The anti-Iraqi forces took hostage the city of Fallujah and projected terrorism across all of Iraq,’’ it states.
The presentation ends with photos of local Iraqis “securely and calmly’’ receiving food supplies from Iraqi security forces.
“Overall, we’ve gotten positive feedback on the packaging, because it contains a lot of information and provides visuals,’’ Bleichwehl said. An Arabic version of the presentation has been released, he said.
A competing vision of the Fallujah operation is presented by the blog titled “Iraq in Pictures’’ (www.fallujahinpictures.com), which Krohn says is far more similar to what Iraqis, and the Arab world, see on their satellite news channels.
The site has become one of the hotter blogs on the Internet, receiving thousands of visits a day.
In the version of the website that was up last week, the first image on the site showed a malnourished Iraqi baby, wide-eyed and screaming in pain, under the sarcastic headline, “another grateful Iraqi civilian.’’
Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in newspapers, showing headless bodies, bloodied troops, wounded women, and bandaged babies missing limbs. One added recently shows a US soldier with part of his face blown away by a bomb.
The blog also amounts to a critique of the US news media. Another section of the site, under the headline, “Also not in today’s news,’’ shows a photograph of a Marine propped against a concrete wall, grimacing as he is treated for a shrapnel wound in his upper right leg.
The blogger — who in an e-mail responding to a query identified himself as “Hugh Upton,’’ but when questioned said that was a pseudonym — explained on his website that one of its purposes is to show the ugliness of what he believes is really going on in Iraq. “The world sees these images and we do not,’’ he states. “That scares the hell out of me, as it should you.’’
He insists that he is sympathetic to US troops. “I am angry with our citizens, not our military,’’ he writes. “If this war is unjust they are among the victims of it.’’
In an interview, the blogger said he started the site after the presidential election, working on it in his spare time, because he believes “there is an emotional truth to the war, and it’s not being shown’’ in the US media. Since starting it, he said, the site has had more than 800,000 hits. He also has received more than 2,000 e-mail messages, about 10 percent of them hate mail, he said.
He declined to disclose his real name or many personal details. He said he is a 26-year-old writer in New York who works for an Internet company. He originally is from the District of Columbia, he said.
After being interviewed, he added more information to his website, insisting: “This is not an anti-war site. You can visit this site and appreciate what it’s doing and still support the war. ... We need the whole story.’’ He added that those wanting to see “the other side’’ of the story should “Go to Fox News, CNN, USA Today, WSJ, the Washington Post, or any of the other outlets that has these pictures and doesn’t show them.’’
Retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has advised the Pentagon on how to better fight in Iraq, said he thinks the military PowerPoint presentation does “a good job of trying to get the real story out.’’
But several other military experts said they found the blog more compelling.
“As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest,’’ said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. “IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war.’’
An army soldier who fought in the Sunni Triangle last year and maintains a blog himself agreed. “The winner has to be the blog,’’ he said. “There’s something all too visceral about seeing the pictures of the dead and wounded, on both sides, which overwhelms static displays of weaponry’’ in the military presentation.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraqi affairs who has a blog called “Informed Comment’’ (www.juancole.com), came to a similar but broader conclusion: “What the two presentations show us is that the US military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds.’’
