About two months ago Multi National Force Iraq, the US backed force in Iraq, started their own YouTube channel called MFNIraq.
The channel has a wide variety of videos including everything from F/A-18 Hornets bombing a chlorine truck to an Iraqi Boyscout Jamboree.
To my surprise, all the official comments I've read on this do not reference the existing YouTube propaganda campaign by Iraqi insurgents.
The insurgent YouTube campaign includes videos of horrendous insurgent activities with messages clearly designed to promote terrorism. The messages are all in Arabic and the videos are widely popular with their target audience.
I'm sure the US military noticed the effectiveness that the insurgents were experiencing by utilizing YouTube and decided to fight back with videos of their own. I'm a little confused why they didn't develop a channel in Arabic, as that might be a better way to counteract the effectiveness of opposing propaganda in Iraq itself.
This may also be a ploy to take some of the spotlight off of some of the more embarrassing military footage out on YouTube.
All in all, I find it very interesting to see these propaganda wars played out in the new 2.0 world. Maybe we could work on a scheme where future conflicts can be settled based who has the most friends on their MySpace profile or who has the coolest people listed in their MyBlogLog. Of course in that scenario with 175,060,680 Myspace friends, Tom would be world emperor.
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