ABSTRACT
Since 9/11, it has been frequently asserted that the West is losing the propaganda war against Islamic extremism. Of course, the Western democracies do not label what they do as ‘propaganda’. That historically pejorative label is reserved for ‘enemy information activities’ such as al-Qaeda websites, bin Laden videotapes and – often unfairly1 – Al Jazeera news reports. Instead, the West prefers a variety of euphemisms to describe its own information campaigns, from public diplomacy in the diplomatic sphere to information operations on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2006, the phrase ‘strategic communications’ has emerged as the preferred overarchingphrase for official democratic state ‘influence activities’ (replacing the dreadful ‘perception management’, which preceded it). But, whatever it is called, there is widespread agreement that both al-Qaeda and the Western democracies are engaged in an information war that needs to be defined in a much broader sense than that outlined in narrow military doctrines. Washington and London have now relabelled ‘The Global War on Terror’ as ‘The Long War’ – which is what the terrorists have been fighting all along. They thought that President Bush was right to initially label it as a ‘crusade’ because, for them, that is precisely what it is. For al-Qaeda, Iraq and Afghanistan are merely the latest battles in a thousand year crusade being waged by the infidels against Islam.
