Tet redux?

(via Austin Bay, who is always very sharp on the information war)

We’ve been bamboozled on Iraq (with the help of our own MSM) by al Qaeda’s successful media strategy, says Harold Hutchison at StrategyPage:

One of the immediate things known in the wake of the American November elections is that the media strategy employed by al Qaeda has succeeded. Having failed to disrupt three elections in Iraq, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups fought to hang in there, and shifted their aim to American newsrooms….

Now, the stage is set for al Qaeda to win a major victory. It was a simple matter of getting the American media to ignore the battlefield victories while accentuating al Qaeda’s attacks. What could not be accomplished on the battlefield – an American retreat from Iraq – was instead achieved in American newsrooms.

Read the whole thing. In general, I’m sympathetic to the premise of this argument—namely, that a battle can be “won” or “lost” in the media, particularly (but not always) if the locus of the actual blood-and-guts fighting (and thus the threat to the lives of those watching) is far removed. I also believe that PR victories matter—and that potentially they can matter a lot (if they accumulate, in the aggregate, into an “irresistible” [to use Malcolm Gladwell's term in The Tipping Point] narrative). I just don’t think we’re near any kind of PR victory for al Qaeda in Iraq that can tip us over into the territory where we’re convinced we’ve been defeated by al Qaeda.

More nuance on this point another time. Meanwhile, here’s a very brief backgrounder on “media victories” as asymmetric warfare.