Emperor Rumsfeld demonstrating a prototype of the Mind-Media Melding Confabulator 3000; a device designed not to just confuse and confound only terrorists, but everyone on the planet. Rumsfeld predicts that in just a few years this bulky device will be minaturized to such an extent that it will be no bigger than his own brain, or about the size of a Tic-Tac.
In April of 2004 Rumsfeld praised the emergent "Iraqi Free Press",and by "free" he didn’t mean it in the fiscal sense, he meant it in the independent and editorial sense.
Unfortunately not even a year later in December of 2005 the DoD admitted it had spent $100 million planting news in the Iraqi Free Press. http://tinyurl.com/b5njr
Now, according to Rumsfeld, the US must fight negative images of the West that are poisoning the public view of the US by operating a more effective, 24-hour propaganda machine that exploits satellite TV and the internet, or risk a "dangerous deficiency."
So according to Rumsfeld the way to combat negative views of the US is not to change policies but to change the perception of its policies, and clearly $100 million is insufficient for the task.
Exactly whom does he seek to persuade, and how?
The western allies of the US have their Bush 'boosters' for sure, but they also have a press far more independent and robust than the US at this time, and with a far more skeptical readership and audience.
In the Arab and Muslim world most media is state-owned. The most "independent" and most widely-watched satellite news service in the Middle East and the Muslim world is Al-Jazeera; a news network that has had several correspondents killed by US forces (possibly accidentally or possibly by design) and that has been often described by the White House as being a propaganda wing of terrorist organizations.
Pro-US news in European and Middle Eastern media will be quickly examined and quickly opposed or exposed, given the general public sentiment in both regions.
Rumsfeld’s implied proposal is to throw even more good money after bad whilst denying the implication that his leadership and initiatives thus far are not his fault.
The public view of the US has been "poisoned" not by propaganda but clear evidence of its policies of arrogance, aggression, cheating, fleecing, lying, spying and torture of which Rumsfeld is a major proponent and its principal instrument.
Rumsfeld is not only criminally and willfully ignorant, but obsessed and insane. The "dangerous deficiency" of which Rumsfeld speaks is Rumsfeld himself.
