Reason’s Charles Paul Freund has a thoughtful consideration of why the CIA would ever set up pro-American Iraqi blogs, as Eric Alterman among others has speculated with regard to Iraq the Model (Jeff Jarvis has savaged Alterman for possibly threatening the Iraqi bloggers). He argues, persuasively to me, that even the CIA can’t be that dumb:
The limitations of a pro-U.S., English-language Iraqi blog should be
obvious. First, it would immediately be suspect in the eyes of my
critics and enemies, and second, all of its sympathetic readers would
already be my allies. True, such a blog could be useful for my side’s
morale, and I might be able to create some breakout posts that got
attention beyond my core of friendly readers. But in the world of black
ops, this is pretty small change. …The real work of black ops lies elsewhere: confusing and if possible
delegitimizing my enemies. For that, I’d want a site that had their
credulous attention, one that echoed and seemed to validate their
views. Once such a site had gained the trust of its readers, I’d wait
for my opportunities to embarrass, mislead, or otherwise manipulate
those readers.
He has much more to say about possible scenarios under which blog fronts might be useful, but nothing approaching Alterman’s rather naive speculation. It’s more likely Alterman is a CIA plant to make the Angry Left so unappealing and impotent to the vast majority of America.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.