Quote of the Day: Barone on Information Warfare

Don’t know how I missed this one from a week ago (must have been “preoccupied” with something else, haha), and I probably owe someone a hat tip but can’t remember who. Anyway, Barone is his usual brilliant self in analyzing why it’s so difficult for the administration to get its message out (not that it shouldn’t be trying harder):

Why we fight with one arm tied behind our backs

….. “The underlying reason why America is doing so poorly in the field of ‘information warfare’ against the jihad is that its traditional organs of articulation–the academy, media, Hollywood–are largely hostile to the war on terror itself. It’s conceivable that an Iranian might flee persecution only to be taught at a U.S. university that he ought to embrace it by the many academic departments whose point of view is exactly that. In a fundamental sense, the war on terror is twinned to the greatest single issue dividing the left and the right, which is whether the United States, as a nation, is legitimate or whether, as some would maintain, it is Amerika: an abomination whose demise must be hastened by any means necessary.”

I’d amend this in one way. When Fernandez says “the greatest single issue dividing the left and right,” I’d like to specify that the left does not include by any means all of the Democratic Party, the academy, media, Hollywood—just an uncomfortably large part of it. And in the case of academia, or at least the humanities and soft social sciences part of academia, most of it. They are not with us in the struggle against Islamist jihad. They may not want us to lose, indeed like children they don’t take seriously the idea that there is any great struggle in which the adults they depend on could lose, but they sure don’t want us to win.

And then when the administration tries to do a professional job of getting its message out and actually spends money doing it, it’s “covert propaganda.” Horse manure.