Symbolic war
Censorship and restrictions on the free flow of information have long been a part of war. For example, a powerful element of America's rush into the Spanish-American War of 1898 was due to the ability of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to wield such significant influence over the coverage of the events that led up to the war.
Nowadays, such a drumbeat to war is more problematic. The promulgation of digital cameras and videocams combined with the instant global access of the Internet means that the mainstream media no longer exerts monopolistic control of martial imagery. It still wields great power, of course - note how the potentially inflammatory images of 9-11 were quickly eradicated from the nation's television screens - but the speed with which images of the Nick Berg murder spread across the Internet demonstrated how the media can no longer hope to definitively dictate the symbols of a given situation.
In his great work, "Tragedy And Hope," Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley explains how the spread of weapons technology affects freedom. As weapons become cheaper and more easily produced, they are acquired by more men. Freedom tends to increase when individuals have access to weapons of the same quality as governments - the great age of liberty began when private men were able to afford better long-barreled rifles than the muskets of the royal British troops.
This concept suggests some interesting notions, even as the public worries about nuclear briefcase weapons and various chemical and biological agents falling into the hands of private individuals like bin Laden.
Quigley, were he alive today, would likely point out that the same argument can be applied to cameras as well. Public access to the truth increases as the price and availability of information production and distribution puts them in the hands of people around the world - a nameless Iraqi blogger has the potential to have more influence on public opinion than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined.
One of the many mistakes the Bush administration has made in waging its war-on-method is to ignore the supreme importance of symbols in a war which is, more than anything, one of semiotics. When even the very name of the enemy is couched in code, it is the height of folly to imagine that the usual technique of crude jingoism and empty sloganeering will suffice to ensure the enthusiastic support of the American people.
Infowar is real, but it is a much more unpredictable thing than conventional war. For one thing, the number of variables is several orders of magnitude higher, as the mere fact of a porn princess pretending to get raped in Romania can have a significant impact on how the U.S. Marines are used in Iraq. Chaos theory clearly applies to global conflict.
In conventional war, reality is the only reality that matters. In symbolic war, perception is the only reality that matters. Given the clumsiness of the Bush administration in dealing with the relatively simple challenge of the mainstream political media, it is difficult to be optimistic with regards to its prospects of successfully addressing the far more complex issue of semiotic war.
What was advertised as freedom and democracy vs. terrorism has insensibly devolved into pornocratic do-gooders forcing benighted medievalists unwillingly into the modern era for their own good. Little wonder, then, if the American people should fail to be inspired by this.
It is too soon to be sure, but it certainly appears as if the symbolic war has been lost. This is not due to Abu Ghraib or the anti-administration media, but a vast combination of variables, some of which were beyond not only the control, but even the imagination of the parties involved. And yet, how foolish was it for the administration to embark on an enterprise of this kind knowing full well that it would be staring down the barrel of its most powerful weapon - the mainstream media - at the first sign of trouble.
George Bush is no conservative, but in this strange new world, he is perceived as one. And so the irony goes full circle, as the anticonservative American media applies the old Arab proverb about the enemy of one's enemy being one's friend to the global jihad.