'Soft-aspect' of US-Iraq War Situation: Commentary

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, April 03, 2003

'Soft-aspect' of US-Iraq War Situation: Commentary

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In the ongoing Iraq war, people can clearly see the multi-dimensional forms of the war, going on simultaneously in the battlefields are also fierce moral, diplomatic, propaganda and psychological wars. The war situation can be analyzed from these "soft aspects".

The international diplomatic war had been raging before the outbreak of the Iraq war. The American objective was to win the UN Security Council authorization to justify its military operations. As everybody knows, the United States and Britain failed to achieve their aim in this campaign. Under the circumstance wherein there was still the possibility for the two countries to find out conclusive evidence proving Iraq's production and storage of weapons of mass destruction. But by now they have found nothing and the weapons Iraq is using are all kept under rules. In this battle of morality, the United States will lose completely if it fails to present to the world conclusive evidence proving Iraq's serious violation of rules.

The United States seemed to have given up diplomatic efforts after being thwarted in battles in this respect at the very beginning. But Iraq continues fighting. Iraqi foreign minister left Iraq in disguise and attended the foreign ministers meeting of Arab League. The meeting issued a quite strong anti-war statement concerning the Iraq war, but Iraq was not satisfied with this.

The United States and Britain also suffered setbacks in the information and psychological battles. Firstly, unlike the environment in the Gulf War, the Arab world now possesses quite influential media such as the Al-Jazeera channel. France and Germany and some other Western countries adopt an antiwar attitude, consequently, there have appeared different reports in Western media. Therefore with these information platforms Iraq is now able to hit back.

Secondly, the allied forces made many big mistakes in the information battle in recent days. For example, the coalition media announced they had captured Umm Qasr on the second day of the war, but a few days later fierce fights in the city again appeared on TV. The United States declared soon after the war broke out that the commander of Iraqi 51 Division surrendered with 8,000 soldiers under his leadership, but two days afterwards, the very commander appeared on Al-Jazeera TV. What's more, on the question regarding the casualty of Iraqi leaders and that of US-UK coalition forces, the US-UK media either fabricated many stories or were in a very passive position, thus greatly reducing the trustworthiness of their military news briefings and media reports. In the opinion of the author, the United States and Britain are not mentally prepared adequately for the cruelty of the war, and have too much optimistic prospective and subjective speculations for the warfare. They have also underestimated Iraq's countering capability for information battles, as a result, they have fallen into the difficult position in both world opinion and the control of sentiment within their nations.

Seeing that things are not going smoothly with the United States and Britain in the "hard" aspect, and they have suffered setbacks in the "soft" aspect of the current war, many people worry whether this would arouse a sentiment of revenge on the part of the United States and Britain, with the result that they, in defiance of any international moral demand and humanitarian consideration, would cause the war to develop in a more barbarian direction. If that is the case, the war will become more tragic and more blood of innocent people would shed on the Iraqi land.

By PD Online Staff Member Li Heng

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