Sunday, November 07, 2004
Marketing trumps even War?
Not a day has gone by since the election without a front-page story on the impending US attack on insurgent-held Falluja.
Call us naive, but why are we advertising this attack? The insurgents in Iraq aren't regular army--they're insurgents. Won't they simply melt away now and reappear later? Isn't that what they've done all along?
We're having a hard time shaking the feeling that this entire effort has at least as much of a marketing component as a military one. There is no military reason for the Pentagon to want all Americans and all the world to know about it ahead of time--just the opposite in fact. The level of detail clearly indicates that this information is not just being gathered by industrious reporters (an oxymoron anyway) but is coming from the military itself.
So the whole point must be that they actually WANT everyone to know.
We hate to keep being right in our cynical predictions, but could it be that the Bush administration knows the insurgents, having been informed of the attack, will melt away and give the US a big post-election victory? It would certainly be in keeping with their thinking to put the inevitable insurgent counter-assaults off for another day.
Call us naive, but why are we advertising this attack? The insurgents in Iraq aren't regular army--they're insurgents. Won't they simply melt away now and reappear later? Isn't that what they've done all along?
We're having a hard time shaking the feeling that this entire effort has at least as much of a marketing component as a military one. There is no military reason for the Pentagon to want all Americans and all the world to know about it ahead of time--just the opposite in fact. The level of detail clearly indicates that this information is not just being gathered by industrious reporters (an oxymoron anyway) but is coming from the military itself.
So the whole point must be that they actually WANT everyone to know.
We hate to keep being right in our cynical predictions, but could it be that the Bush administration knows the insurgents, having been informed of the attack, will melt away and give the US a big post-election victory? It would certainly be in keeping with their thinking to put the inevitable insurgent counter-assaults off for another day.
