Don't fall for the propaganda

Baghdad Betty had nothing on these guys and they are much more effective today

Propaganda becomes comedy

I arrived in the Saudi Arabian desert in mid-August 1990 with the 24th Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. I was an aeroscout platoon leader with the 1st battalion, 24th Aviation (Attack).

It was super hot.

As our luck would have it our ship carrying all of our aircraft and gear broke down halfway across the Atlantic and had to be towed to Rota, Spain for transfer to another ship. So, we spent several weeks languishing in a desolate place aptly called ‘Cement City.’ A former cement plant that the coalition forces had taken over as a temporary tent city for transitioning troops.

We had time on our hands and old school radios to listen to whatever we could find. What we found on AM 1190 was a terrific mix of current music, oldies from the 60’s and 70’s, and daily propaganda broadcasts from Iraq featuring the now iconic, ‘Baghdad Betty.’

The Iraqi government was running a series of propaganda efforts to break our morale and turn soldiers against each other. The hook was the music. The talking heads were the actual propaganda. They weren’t very good. It became a running joke about how ludicrous their pronouncements became each day.

These are actual quotes from an after war review of propaganda efforts:

Dear American soldier....are you prepared to die for a barrel of oil?

To the American soldier in the Saudi Arabia desert. Would you like to be one of the cripples who are only lamented in the charity ceremonies.

One of your pals even killed himself a week ago, feeling terribly lonely. And two GI’s quarreled with each other, and one of them shot his colleague after they used to be good friends.

Demand to go home. Put down your cannons and your bombs. You know you cannot win against our fearsome troops and the invincible best friend of Allah.

This is only normal for one who is not accustomed to live in the desert and is forced to do so for so long a time could easily be driven to craziness. Then suicide is the only way out.

So American soldiers, how do you like our Arab lands where you cannot get a Kentucky Fry Big Mac to eat and you are always missing your half-naked immoral sweetheart back home.

You are weary of sand and sun and sweat on your body from senseless aggression. You are secretly admiring the great leader Saddam Hussein and asking yourself: 'Why am I here?'

George Bush is like the stupid rat that enters into the house of the clever fox -- our brave Saddam Hussein. He cannot think with his brains like our leader and he is a coward with no intestines. Your American president is losing allies and will be soon loosing the was. So soldier, why be dead in his dumb mistake?

This stuff was pure comedy gold and found its way into our daily conversations. “Hey, guys I just got a letter from my half-naked immoral sweetheart!” My favorite part of the story is that when the air war began we dropped a bomb on the station and replaced it with our own broadcasts that drove thousands of Iraqi soldiers to surrender.

We even adopted a dog we found in one of our last forward operating bases during the invasion and named her “Basrah Betty.” She flew in the back of my OH-58 all the way back to Saudi Arabia and eventually made it to the U.S. thanks to a helpful ARAMCO employee after the war.

In 2003 they upgraded their operations of lies to include the now infamous Baghdad Bob. He was the guy regularly appearing on TV telling the international press, coalition forces, and Iraqi people that the Iraqis would easily defeat our forces and everything was fine. It produced some pretty awesome memes even in the early days of that concept and they continue today.

They are better at it today

It’s laughable now when we look back at Baghdad Betty and Bob. The silliness of their ineffectual efforts to change the news and divert our attention. We knew they were lying but they continued to try.

So, let’s talk about buying Greenland, invading Canada, Trump receiving a resounding mandate in a landslide election, nothing can stop his power now, and our democracy is over.

Yes…those are the same lies with a different audience. Us.

When you take a step back and break out any of the things I listed above you can see they are ludicrous.

• We are not buying, or taking, an entire independent territory from a NATO ally.

• We are not invading our biggest trading partner and friendliest neighbor over hurt feelings.

• Trump won by barely 1.6% of the total vote and it boiled down to about a quarter of a million votes across three key states. Not only doesn’t he have a mandate he didn’t even get a majority with 49% of the popular vote and polls already showing he goes into office with a negative favorability as a lame duck President.

• He does not have unlimited, unchecked power. They barely have a 3-vote margin in the House of Representatives and pissing off Mike Turner by firing him as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is just the start of the undermining of their own efforts. Turner allegedly told colleagues he wouldn’t ‘vote for anything in this fucking place from now on’ and as of this writing he has not. People with “unchecked” power don’t have so little wiggle room.

• No…our Democratic Republic is not finished. Yes, we will have elections. Yes, they have malign plans but the courts have not completely surrendered as you have seen as recently as this week when the Supreme Court refused to stop the release of the Jack Smith report. One thing you can count on is how slow the courts are and how eager a brigade of legal eagles on the right side of this are to sue the Administration.

I could go on and on but the point of this isn’t a deep research and argument for why their many announced plans are wrong or factually impossible. The point is that we have got to stop falling for it. We have got to stop buying their bullshit.

Not an hour goes by on my social media channels where I don’t get a reply to a post saying something like, “It’s over…how come you don’t get that?” “Your hopium is pathetic. The whole country is racist and fascist.” “You really think there will be elections?”

I could go on and on with screenshots of them all but frankly it reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in Ted Lasso when Roy blew off doing a press conference and Rebecca wasn’t having it.

In her immortal words…it’s all so fucking ponderous.

Let’s not do this

You don’t have to believe me but you have to not believe them. I have been to war four times. Sadly two of them involved the actual invasions of Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. Each time I listened to the propaganda from our enemies. They wanted us to believe we would lose. They wanted us to be afraid of their army and their experience in war against Iran.

They wanted us to be too afraid to fight and to give up hope.

Does this sound familiar to you? That’s what MAGA wants. That’s what Fox, Newsmax, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller, and all of the monstrous mouthpieces and propagandists online like fucking Cat Turd and that complete asshole Elon Musk want.

They want us to give up. They want us to throw our hands up and surrender before offering a fight. They want us to quit before there is even a battle. What’s better than fighting a battle to win? Not even fighting at all because your opponent surrenders.

I like Timothy Snyder and he has been having a moment thanks to his book ‘On Tyranny’ where he exhorts his readers not to “obey in advance.” I agree but I would go a step further not to believe in advance. Not to surrender in advance.

I know this propaganda works because we did it to them. Remember when we took over their radio frequencies during Desert Storm as I mentioned above? Well we told the Iraqi soldiers what we were going to do to them…sometimes it wasn’t true at all.

In an after action review of our efforts Colonel Jeffrey Jones, Commanding Officer of the Army’s 8th Psychological Task Force, recalled how effective our efforts were on the enemy.

We would tell them that tomorrow we would drop on them the biggest bomb we had,"Then, exactly as promised, we dropped a ‘Daisy Cutter’ (BLU-82) that looks like a small atom bomb detonating. The next time we said we were going to drop another big one like that, the defections increased dramatically.”

“One Iraqi soldier came across clutching 343 safe conduct passes he had been collecting. We found over 52 percent of defectors had been listening to our broadcasts.”

The Iraqi soldiers surrendered often without a fight at all. I had one try to surrender to my scout helicopter in the middle of a battle. I just waved my arms at him like “sorry bud, no room for POW’s.”

Is that the legacy you want to be part of? Surrendering from words? Surrendering from threats without even actions to back them up?

I won’t do it.

We are far from done. We are far from defeated. These bastards don’t even like each other no matter us. We will fight them every inch of the way in the courts, online, in Congress, and peacefully in the streets.

We don’t need violence at all. It would only give them ammo in the end. We just need to not surrender to their lies.

You in?