Originally Posted by KirkVining

No matter whether we think we are Nazis or not, the problem with the course we embarked on with the pre-emptive doctrine is that we have not only caused ourselves to be perceived as Nazis, but we have also acted in a way that allows our enemies to successfully portray us as such. In effect, we have lost our first major battle in a new type of war we do not understand - digital war. In the digital wars of today a nation must do everything in its power to NOT do things that will cause it to be perceived as something it is not.

In order for our enemy to win, the false perception our enemy must create of us must be powerful and motivating, to the point it moves a human being to kill himself in order to kill us. Those who recruit these people win their battles by winning these people over to the warped perception, not the reality we know, of us. We've in effect, by continuing to practice war as if we were fighting the Russians, have become their best ally. We have, in effect, by projecting America-Uber-alles rhetoric and bombast on the rest of the world, have become our enemies best propaganda aide. Look at what we have done - by abrogating the UN we have allowed our enemies to portray us as a single colonial power, acting agressively in concert with the colonial power that came before us, the British, to invade them. Then we embark on occupation by force of arms, in a manner usually only practiced in Europe by fascists or in the Arab world by Israelis, both potent propaganda images for the Arabs and the European people we hope would be our allies. Both activities result in reams of digital images, of blown up children and grief stricken mothers in the moments of their greatest torment, of fathers holding dead children in their arms and young boys with their limbs blown off. We also did not seem to understand that their impact could be disproportional. There might be only 20 of them in all Iraq, but those 20 pictures flash around the world in an instant. Next, our occupation results in a steady stream of web pages and photos of sucide bombers and resistance fighters, who knows, maybe they are only fighting in a small corner of Iraq, but the Internet makes it look as the whole country is in flames resisting our oppression. Next we re-institute the prisons of the old regime, but again we lose the next battle of the new digital war as pictures of torture and humiliation like those practiced by totalitarian societies, are shot round the globe in instants. We have lost the digital war in Iraq because from the first day we have acted in the best way to do so. Those who initiated and prosecute this war have utterly failed to appreciate the new nature of war in the information age. For this, they should be fired for their incompetence come Nov 2.

No matter who we think we are, to the rest of the world, we have, thanks to the inability of our leaders to realize the new importance of perception, become Nazis. The thought of us as morally equivelent to Nazis or someone like me suggesting we are, repels you, because you as an American knows it is not essentially true. I actually believe it is not true. However, I believe your repulsion may cause you to miss the point of my argument: It doesn't matter if we are or not. Our actions, as Jim points out, are not based in self-defense, from the first step we made. The foundation was laid, the moral argument lost, from that point forward. In an earlier post someone said that Iraq may be some new kind of war we mere citizens don't understand. I think this shows the opposite is true, by using invasion and occupation, by not understanding the affect of the images of ourselves we are generating to the rest of the world, without trying to understand before we do something what perception our actions and bombast will create, we, are the ones practicing obsolete war, while the terrorists are skillfully not. Our misunderstanding of perception's role in modern warfare is currently our undoing. Instead of losing a war on a battlefield, we may lose it due to some images from a digital camera. In the new world we live in, powered by digital images, the Internet and instant communications, perception is a new, super weapon of war. Bush and company, powered only by their view of the end, never had a clue that the means they employed would make it a huge mess instead. In the words of an earlier post, we screwed the pooch.