Today’s New York Times has an interesting article by C.J. Chivers pointing out that a number of retired and active American officers question the strategy of trying to ridicule Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by distributing video “outtakes” of his supposedly fumbling with a machine gun (which turns out to be a captured American weapon, not exactly an advertisement against the skills of the terrorists.) The critics point out that he could not be expected to be familiar with this difficult to deal with weapon and that few insurgents or prospective insurgents would be turned off by the ploy. The geniuses who thought up this brilliant piece of psychological warfare were apparently inspired by a paper written by one J. Michael Waller and which has been circulating at the Pentagon, advocating the use of ridicule against the insurgents. Waller is quoted in the Times article: “In Arab and Muslim societies, pride and shame are felt much more profoundly than they are in Western culture.”

J. Michael Waller is a faculty member of the Institute of World Politics in Washington, a right-wing graduate school praised profusely on its Web site by the Wall Street Journal. His faculty bio, which can be found on the Institute’s Web site at

http://www.iwp.edu/faculty/facultyID.12/profile.asp

shows that the professor is well connected in Washington but betrays no experience whatsoever in Muslim countries or with Muslim cultures. Perhaps he was just too modest to put this on his resume, or could it be that his facile ideas about psychological warfare are just the kind of thing that the amateurs at the Pentagon find compelling? So much for winning hearts and minds, and so much for any demonstration of competence on behalf of our leaders.