Posted on 04/05/2003 5:56:53 PM PST by delacoert
WITH SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES, in southern Iraq, April 5 — These bombs flutter.
With pockets of Iraqi forces continuing to put up fierce resistance around the port city of Basra, Special Operations commanders sent one of the Air Force's most secret aircraft into battle.
The MC-130 Combat Talon is loaded with electronic equipment that enables the lumbering, 40-year-old propeller plane to dodge radars, missiles and even fighter jets to deliver commandos deep inside enemy territory. But last night, it carried a different payload: boxes of leaflets.
"The coalition is here to put an end to the oppression caused by Saddam and his regime," read one, emblazoned with a snarling President Saddam Hussein. "The coalition wishes no harm to the people of Iraq."
"The coalition has amassed a formidable fighting force," read another, which carried a photograph of American soldiers with Apache attack helicopters swooping low overhead. "To confront them would bring your certain destruction."
The Combat Talon crossed into Iraqi airspace, then turned north along the Iranian border. As the plane approached its drop zone south of Basra, the pilot, a major with the Air Force reserves who flew for Delta Air Lines before the war, shouted, "Green light!" and the crew shoved the first box out the back.
The box burst apart when it reached the end of a rope tethering it to the plane. The leaflets scattered to the winds like a flock of frightened starlings, starting their slow descent to Iraqi soil.
If Air Force planners calculated the wind and the scatter patterns correctly, the leaflets would land in a precise concentration of 32 fliers per 120 square yards.
There is no precise science for determining whether anyone reads the leaflets, much less heeds their warnings. But Special Operations commanders insist that there is anecdotal evidence that scores of Iraqi soldiers carrying the leaflets have surrendered.
The leaflet carpet bombing is just one part of the most extensive psychological operations campaign in American military history, commanders say.
Since October, American and British planes have dropped 36 million leaflets on Iraqi positions across the country. They have distributed scores of solar-powered and hand-crank short-wave radios with instructions for tuning in to Arabic-language broadcasts that urge cooperation with coalition troops. Wanted posters with photographs of Baath Party and fedayeen militia leaders are being posted inside towns.
Iraqi opposition leaders have ridden into villages in Special Forces trucks to urge citizens to support the American-led campaign. Trucks with loudspeakers and drones have blared recordings of rumbling tanks, trying to confuse Iraqi troops into thinking assaults were under way.
There has even been an unconfirmed report that a box of leaflets killed an Iraqi soldier after it failed to disgorge its contents and plummeted to the ground like a boulder.
In contrast to the first Persian Gulf war, when psychological operations were incorporated into the mission relatively late, this time the planners had been working closely with senior officers in Central Command headquarters since long before the war began.
Indeed, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander in chief of all allied forces in the region, carefully scrutinizes every leaflet and radio script before it is released, Special Forces officers said.
Even the White House, through its Office of Global Communications, has been involved, trying to ensure that the messages disseminated in Iraq conform to the themes presented by President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The overall psychological campaign is being directed by the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., where teams of specialists armed with advanced degrees in Middle Eastern history and sociology produce scripts, posters and radio programs. But smaller teams have been sent to the field to respond quickly to changing battlefield conditions.
At one of those forward bases, soldiers scanned the Internet for the latest war news, and illustrators sketched designs for fliers while a copy machine churned out hundreds of handbills.
"It's pretty much like doing marketing work," said a 26-year-old illustrator for the team. "You've got a customer, a market and an audience."
Team leaders bristle at the notion that what they do is propaganda. They tell the truth, they insist, because they plan to use the same techniques to help build an interim government, as psychological operation teams are currently doing in Afghanistan.
"When I think of propaganda, I think of Joseph Goebbels and the Iraqi regime," said a captain. "Lying may work the first time, but try it a second time and your psychological campaign is over."
I am sure this is a concept that is foreign to the NY Times, but it is comparatively easy to sell something when what you are selling is the truth.
Another clueless idiot from the New York Times who didn't check his facts. Until SpecOps gets "J" models, it's the navigator who calls "Green light", not the pilot. But then again, the Times isn't so much concerned about printing the facts and the truth as it is about disseminating its warped and twisted ideological viewpoint.
LOL! Of course they are!
I wonder if they are "real", or are printed from the hi-res images of the leaflets that are floating around?
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