In 2005 Al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote a letter to the then top insurgent leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “[M]ore than half of this battle,” he wrote, “is taking place in the battlefield of the media.... [W]e are in a media battle, in a race for the hearts and minds of our umma [people].” As the struggle in Iraq between the insurgents on the one hand and US military and Iraqi security forces on the other reaches a climactic phase, it is clear that the insurgents, far from being a band of crude guerrilla fighters, have taken the Al Qaeda leader’s injunction to heart and have coupled the tactics of terror with a sophisticated knowledge and use of modern media.

Their command of the Internet, their use of television, their release and timing of material calculated to be picked up and used by Arab and Western TV outlets and news agencies, indicates a high degree of planning and professionalism. When US forces stormed into Iraq bent on toppling Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon adopted a new and enlightened policy toward press coverage. US reporters were embedded into combat units and, with the aid of modern communications techniques, sent dramatic real-time coverage of a brilliant military campaign to millions of spellbound Americans back home.

Journalists-turned-military-reporters shared the same hardships and dangers of the troops, some losing their lives in the process of reporting the story. Censorship was minimal, designed to keep sensitive information about troop movements from giving any help to the enemy. By contrast, the propaganda efforts of Hussein’s information ministry were laughable, with “Baghdad Bob” continuing to proclaim victory even as US tanks were entering the Iraqi capital.

In the aftermath of the war, fewer US correspondents were embedded with US military units,

and the story took a different direction. Then came more negative stories of US mistakes. Some US military officers are charging that a clever enemy media campaign is gaining traction and that the US is losing the war in information about battlefield operations. A Marine officer whose credibility I trust sites an operation of success in the Fallujah region earlier this month that was reported as a disaster by US and British media companies.

In a separate firefight at a makeshift suicide vehicle factory, three separate suicide bombers were killed, two suicide trucks were discovered and blown up, and foreign and other fighters were killed or captured. “The enemy was killed in his tracks; his best weapon was discovered before it could cause any harm,” says the officer, “but Western media reported no enemy killed in these operations, 28 civilians killed, and 50 civilians wounded. We are getting demolished,” the Marine officer says, “by US media outlets.” “Why spend precious resources on developing your own propaganda machine when you can make your opponent’s own news outlets scream your message louder than you could ever have hoped to do independently?” — The Christian Science Monitor