Whose Hearts and Minds?

According to this post by Juan Cole, a major criticism of American troops by other countries' troops in Iraq is that we are too quick to assume that the solution to our problems with the insurgents lies simply in "killing 'em dead until there ain't no more." Attempting to get the hearts and minds of the ordinary Iraqis has gone by the wayside.

Michael Schwartz at AntiWar.com makes a similar point at how we are trying to view every problem a a simple military one with a simple military solution: kill 'em::

Rather than allow the perpetrators to take refuge in a nearby home and then quietly slip away, the U.S. command decided to take out the house, even though they had no guarantee that it was uninhabited (and every reason to believe the opposite). The paramount goal was to kill or capture the suspected guerrilla fighters, and if this involved the death or injury of multiple Iraqi civilians, the tradeoff was clearly considered worth it.

Which leads one to question whether any of the talk about hearts and minds is about Iraqi hearts and minds or American ones. That is, as I have asked before (as have others), is the goal of funding propaganda in the papers, painting schools, etc., to gain Iraqi suport for an American presence, or to put on a nice face for American news cameras, so Sean Hannity can dutifully report on all of the "good news that is being ignored by the eeeeevvvvil MainStream Media (MSM)." (Of course, the fact that there has been an air war going on in Iraq, not in the future, or recently, but from the beginning, mentioned by Tom Engelhardt in the same article as the Schwartz piece, is a piece of news that the media has ignored and that I have a feeling that a lot of the pro-warriors would be just as happy not be reported).

If you look at the administration as using the Iraqis as props to rebuild American support for the war, and not as trying to actually help the Iraqis for the purpose of winning their hearts and minds (at least in the case of the Sunni Arabs), I think that you get a far different picture of what is going on in Iraq.

That is all.