CENTCOM Idea Follow Up

Last night, after scrounging around YouTube for a while and not finding what I was looking for, I wrote an open letter to CENTCOM asking them to start providing bloggers material to highlight the good things that are going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. There is a ton of it out there. I know, because I work with the guys doing it.

The center-right blogosphere complains endlessly about the bias in the Mainstream Media (MSM). I'm guilty of this as well. Our Patriarch of the Airwaves interviews journalists on his radio show and regularly stumps them with very simple factual questions. It's no secret that they are culturally anti-military. Practically none of them have ever served nor do they have family members who have served. So what? You knew this before you started the war. Deal with it.

Fighting terrorists is a PR campaign. Publicity is their only weapon. As others have noted, the enemy in Iraq is down to blowing up markets. They've failed to make a dent in the US military, they can't stop the Iraqi security forces, so they're reduced to incinerating the local Safeway. In military terms, that's called "losing". The only thing they have left is the MSM. If they can convince the MSM there's a civil war going on, something the MSM desperately wants to believe, then they might be able to convince us that the whole thing is a hopeless mess and we should just get out.

CENTCOM has all the tools necessary to respond to the nightly bodybag scoreboard from the MSM. There are plenty of reconstruction and medical teams throughout the theater. With a handheld video camera and some very crude editing, you could blanket YouTube and other such outlets with candid footage of the progress being made. It's just not that hard.

Spirit of America has posted a couple of videos on YouTube, but none of them seem to have voice overs or translations. Check out the kids in this video. Would you want to leave them to be blown up?

We can't afford to lose. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, the demographics of the world are against us. Our best hope for the future is to spread liberal democracies throughout the Muslim world. If we fail here, we probably won't get another chance. The next fight will be a civil war in a European country where the Islamofascist population has become large enough to try and take over.

Stop complaining about the MSM. You knew they would side with the enemy before you started because they just don't know enough to see what's going on. There are plenty in the new media who get it, but we can't spread the word without a word to spread. If we end up leaving Iraq before we're finished, we have only ourselves to blame.