Friday, June 22, 2012

PSYOP and Al Qaeda: The Few Targets Left


I was having a tough time today coming up with my weekly Blog post. Most of the time writing comes pretty easily to me, but today was just one of those days. Perhaps it was bonding with the plumbers who were replacing the Hot Water Heater. Perhaps it was slaving away on a paper dealing with the new EU Data Privacy regime. Whatever it was -- today was a tough one.

Determined to find something I came across an article from Reuters “Strikes on al Qaeda leave only “handful” of top targets” (see http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/22/us-usa-panetta-saudi-idUSBRE85L05320120622). 

The headline struck my fancy.At first I was going to write about the kind of pin point campaign that might be needed to overwhelm the remaining targets inducing them to surrender. The article went on to say there were only 8 targets left.

If it were targeted against these 8 – would they feel cornered or emboldened or would they even give a sh*t?

Then it dawned on me – the real target of any message from that article is other terrorist groups and their leadership. The message is that if we want to, the US will expend much of its treasure and we will be uncharacteristically relentless in tracking down and destroying terrorist targets.

I could be cynical and say the motivation behind this effort is the fact that this is an election year and that the Commander-in-Chief wants to bulk up his defense bona fides or I could say that the US has adapted to the new kind of asymmetric war that is terrorism. Please don’t interrupt today’s illustration as an exemplification of my political views, it just happened to reflect today’s theme.

Alternatively it could be just another story that has no PSYOP alternative meaning. 

I’ll let you sort it out. Have a good weekend, or for those of you reading this after 25 June 2012, I hope you had a good weekend.

(Photo Source: Google Image Search; credited to: http://afunnyfeminist.tumblr.com/ I know it should be a 12, but I figured y’all could use a bit of your imagination)

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