Abstract
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s best Republican Guard unit, the al-Nida Division, dismantled itself. An armored division of 13,000 men, fully equipped with 500 tanks and vehicles, the unit was deployed to defend the eastern approaches of Baghdad against the coalition and to crush the expected Shiite rising in its wake. Under Saddam Hussein’s paranoid and sclerotic leadership, units like this were in fact rare and treated cynically. Most regular units were equipped and manned only on paper, and those few elite formations like al-Nida that were professionally manned, outfitted, and trained, Saddam considered a prime threat to the regime. As a consequence he deployed them far from the capital, cut off from command and communications to discourage plots and conspiracies against him.
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Notes
Quote and preceding excerpt from Kevin M. Woods with Michael R. Pease, Mark E. Stout, Williamson Murray and James G. Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project (Norfolk, VA: Joint Center for Operational Analysis, US Joint Forces Command, 2006), 124–125.
A presentation cited by Curtis D. Boyd, Psychological Operations, Joint Special Operations University Report 07–4, (Hurlburt Field, FL: JSOU Press, 2007), 15; Fick does not mention the leaflets in his memoir One Bullet Away (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), but this is corroborated by two sources cited in Dr. Daniel L. Haulman, “USAF Psychological Operations, 1990–2003,” US Air Force Historical Research Agency (Air University: Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, May 23, 2003), 12.
Haulman, “USAF Psychological Operations, 1990–2003,” 16–17. See also Sean M. Maloney, Enduring the Freedom (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), 46.
Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, editor, and Peter Paret, translator, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 184–185. For a more extensive discussion of Clausewitz’s relationship to psychological warfare, see William M. Darley, “Clausewitz’s Theory of War and Information Operations,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 40 (First Quarter 2006), 73–79. I would note that Darley exhibits the usual confusion about psychological operations, information operations, and even public diplomacy demonstrated in this chapter.
An excellent survey written in parallel to this chapter is Russel Rumbaugh and Matthew Leatherman, “The Pentagon as Pitchman,” The Stimson Center, September 2012. The study covers largely the same issues, with some valuable quantitative analysis, but at the policy-political level. This chapter focuses on practical or field-level applications.
Michael Hastings, “Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators,” Rolling Stone, February 23, 2011. Hastings, who wrote the infamous “Runaway General” article for Rolling Stone in 2010 that led to the dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, similarly confuses psychological operations and information operations in the article.
Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 56, 58.
Gen. David Petraeus, “COMISAF’s Counterinsurgency Guidance, Headquarters, International Security Assistance Force,” Kabul, Afghanistan, August 1, 2010. Emphasis in original.
Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006), 217.
Adm. Mike Mullen, “Strategic Communication: Getting Back to Basics,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 55 (Fourth Quarter 2009), 2–4.
Donovan Campbell, Joker One (New York: Random House, 2009), 112.
This quote and the following excerpt are from Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise (New Haven: Yale University Press 2008), 198–199.
Rajiv Chandrasekran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (New York: Knopf, 2006), 145–155.
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© 2013 James Thomas Snyder
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Snyder, J.T. (2013). Overt Operations. In: The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390713_5
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