It hasn’t been a great moment in media. Most commentators are settling for outrage, horror, shock, disbelief—the whole deplorer’s thesaurus. But there’s really nothing very irrational or surprising about these beheading videos. IS was on a roll, overrunning lightly armed Peshmerga and village militias, before the US ruined everything by authorizing drones and airstrikes. It must have been damned annoying, being an IS fighter, bouncing over the plains in your Toyota Hilux, as the terrified Iraqi Army forces vanished ahead of you in a cloud of panicky dust. Quite a rush for the mix of AQI survivors and European-Muslim war tourists who fill IS’s ranks.
And then all of a sudden, you go from the dashing light-armor knights of the Iraqi plain to the biggest, most vulnerable targets imaginable—thin-skinned vehicles crawling over a completely flat, treeless plain while the drones buzz overhead, armed with Hellfire missiles, just waiting for authorization from a desk jockey in suburban Virginia before they release a weapon designed to destroy much bigger, tougher, Soviet tanks. Suddenly, you, with your Sunni Lawrence of Arabia war-tourist dreams, are nothing but a bug getting zapped by an automated pest-control device.
Absolutely knew he would make this point before I read this, and of course he didn't disappoint. If only Brecher was the sole voice of the media in the middle east. Vividly reminded of stories of Northern Alliance soldiers fleeing en masse when confronted with even a handful of Chechen foreign nationals, who've cultivated their reputation as the most dangerous troops in the world.Then the blade goes into action—though several news networks announced they had no intention of showing the actual knife-work, in a “That’ll show those terrorists” tone. Yes, the media is doing its part to fight terrorism—by giving it a bigger buildup than bikini week during the sweeps, then doing a classic tease-cut before the X-rated stuff.
Finally, you’re hoping that some Kurdish and Shia Iraqi fighters will see or hear about the video, because you want them terrified of you. It was that terror that led many Iraqi Army units to bug out before they ever even saw the black flag of IS up close. As Brando intoned while the sweat dripped from his fat face in Apocalypse Now, “Terror is your friend…” When you’re a relatively small conventional fighting force like IS, terror is your best weapon.
Well wasn't the lynching propaganda similar in some way, used to strike fear into the hearts of blacks and their would be white supporters by conservative, backward, anachronistic barbarians? That same propaganda was turned around on the US by the Soviets at the security council to show what capitalism and classism does to people. I think there's a strong parallel there.