Comment on Belmont's "The Lamp Under the Bushel Basket"
In "The lamp under the bushel basket" we find a discussion of how "the US goverment, the State Department in particular, is playing by gentleman's rules in the information war with Iran", what the consequences are, and how the situation might be rectified:
In a open post session to identify ways to improve US information warfare, many Belmont commenters believed that the government was by nature incapable of doing the job. Some suggestions of private and legal information warfare activities to take up the slack included (u)sing private resources, such as bloggers, volunteers, institutes to monitor open source foreign language newspapers, broadcasts and websites to augment the official intel effort. Roger Simon at Pajamas Media tried the idea out on James Woolsey at a videotaped interview and received some encouragement (and) (p)roviding support for individuals being persecuted for supporting the allied cause in the War on Terror in the manner of the "Underground Railroad." ... It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye'or, Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali by themselves do more information warfare damage than the whole State Department cumulatively. Private effort should definitely not be discounted.
My comments regarded the matter of "private effort" :
I believe it was ex-President Gerald Ford who said "any government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you've got."Whether true or not, I think the statement describes a special case of a more general phenomenon- that capabilities are elastic; that is to say, though developed for one purpose, they can and will eventually be deployed toward other ends.
It is this premise that makes me not concerned that the US government is, at present, demonstrably incapable of conducting a successful information war against our sworn and implacable foes.
By my thinking, were the US government so capable, there would certainly come a time when those capabilities would be directed at the populace that they were originally intended to protect. And with dire consequences.
That said, I do find it quite distressing that the US, in distinction to the US government, is not presently doing a better job of fighting said war.
The solution I envision provides for an expanded role for self-directed, highly-decentralized, geographically-dispersed networks of ordinary US/Western netizens. I envision bloggers taking the lead and the government following.
Given that so much of the capabilities to do so lie outside the government to begin with, I find it hard to envision any federal agency or government bureaucarcy beign able to marshall these resources, let alone to properly organize and direct them toward the desired end.