re: The war on terror
My thoughts of what could have been done better posted on Flame
Here's the part important to this discussion:
I think Bush has been doing a pretty good job with the war on terrorism, however, it could use some major improvements in one major area. Public image. I don't care about our public image to the terrorists. Its our image to the Iraqis and Afghanis I care most about. Even the europeans can wait. Remember Gulf War 1. There were a lot of Iraqis who received first hand knowledge of how Americans treat POWs. That was the best PR campaign ever fought IMO. Its too bad we couldn't hold that image. When Iraqis think of prisoners, they no longer think of smiling americans handing out smokes and water. No now they think of smiling americans smoking in front of a naked iraqi pyramid. They see private Lindie walking a naked Iraqi on a leash. In Afghanistan they remember prisoners being loaded into a cargo container and not coming out alive. That's got to be the biggest PR turnaround ever.
There's an old saying. When people are spreading vicious rumors about you, live in such a way that no one believes them. Abu Graib should never have happened. Especially not to ordinary Iraqis in a prison that was once a torture chamber run by Saddam. What were we thinking? Instead the Iraqi on the street needed to see Americans everywhere cleaning up. From the trash on the street to the insurgent at the end of the block. It would have taken more troops at first, but perhaps that could have been downsized by the better cooperation earned from the Iraqis. Maybe we would have seen more Iraquis cleaning up their own insurgents. Yes its happening, but at too small a scale.
The embedded reporters was a stroke of genious. Why couldn't some of that genius been extended into the cleanup phase. The media is not the enemy, although they sometimes seem that way. What happened to the media after the Saddaam statue fell? I wish the media would* have stayed with the troops during the reconstruction phase. Perhaps it was too boring for live TV, I don't know.*typo in original, was wouldn't, I meant would.