If you have watched any news over the last few weeks then you have certainly heard more than a few conservatives spouting off something along these lines, 'The media is only reporting the bad things happening in Iraq and ignoring all the good that is happening there.' This has obviously become one of the major talking points of the republican party after weeks of deaths and suicide bombings in Iraq. They have resorted back to their old, whiny refrain, 'It is all the media's fault.'
Well, now the 'support the war' effort has gone a step beyond the republican party. Now, the government has decided to release letters, the same identical letter, to local newspapers from hometown soldiers fighting in Iraq. The Olympian, Olympia, Washington's local newspaper, "received two identical letters signed by different hometown soldiers: Spc. Joshua Ackler and Spc. Alex Marois, who is now a sergeant. The paper declined to run either because of a policy not to publish form letters." The letter states many of the same things you'll here republicans mention on cable news programs. The letter talks about building fire houses, restoring sewage systems. They describe an Iraq where people greet them as liberators and not as occupiers.
Obviously, some of the soldiers that have been contacted about these letters say they agree with the content of the letter, but as one soldier stated, "It makes it look like you cheated on a test, and everybody got the same grade." We, as Americans, should be outraged that our troops are being used as mindless propagandizers, especially when we are the recipients of their propaganda. It is one thing when a congressman or a conservative puppet regurgitates their prerequisite talking points for the news, but it is an entirely different matter when you bring the American troops in to spoonfeed questionable schmaltz to the hometown paper, whose readership is eager to believe the local soldiers are honest men and women.
However, The Olympian also reports that one "soldier didn't know about the letter until his father congratulated him for getting it published in the local newspaper in Beckley, W.Va. 'When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: 'What letter?' " Now, many of the soldiers that signed the letter did know about it, and had read it before they signed it, but nobody really knows who wrote it. Joshua Micah Marshall from Talking Points Memo has a few ideas. It could be "the innocent, but over-eager effort of a single Army public affairs officer somewhere in northern Iraq." Then again, it might have been one of "a number of firms in Washington whose business it is to orchestrate phony letter writing campaigns on behalf of pricey clients." If the latter possibility were to be true, well, then who might be behind this very expensive effort to orchestrate a message that things are going better than the media is reporting in Iraq. Could it be the same people that are telling republicans to regurgitate this same message on cable news programs?