The Defense Department will use $300 million of your tax money over the next three years to propagandize Iraqis to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government. Much of this will be in the form of filmed vignettes with a message that will be given to Iraqi media outlets. As one official put it, however, “They don’t know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything.” So it will be covert propaganda to boot.
This suggests that the U.S., in letting out three-year contracts, is planning a fairly long-term occupation of Iraq. It also suggests that the government is doing abroad what it would really like to do more of at home: using the peoples’ taxes to propagandize them on behalf of government objectives. Not that the government doesn’t do a fair amount of that already, as this previous post demonstrates.
This is probably the best use of taxpayer money in the long Iraq war. Considering the Billions we have spent over there in Iraq, this is a good deal and something that could be quite effective. Propaganda coming from the West will always be more benerficial to the people living in the Middle East than the Propaganda coming out of the radical Mosques.
I thought the iraqi oil was going to pay for the Iraq war.
Isn’t that what Bush and the republicans told us?
Whatever happened to that promise?
‘Propaganda coming from the West will always be more benerficial to the people living in the Middle East than the Propaganda coming out of the radical Mosques.’
Oh yea. Let me see what people are going to believe and trust. Life-long spiritual and social interaction with the local religious centers or some line of BS from foreign occupiers. Propaganda rarely works on occupied populations effectively - a few converts, nothing more( but the they will be paraded on our news for sure). I can see the propaganda is still working fine on the US population. Conflicts have ebbs and flows. Just because its quieter than usual, it does not mean you have won.