FreshArrival

Proposed Iraq Psyop: No More Boring Leaflets

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As part of a 247-page document dump on the Iraq war, the Department of Defense last week made public some interesting psychological operations leaflets that were proposed for the impending military campaign. The Memory Hole has put together an excellent gallery of the leaflets, which were apparently never dropped.

The Pentagon also released a memo (reproduced here) by Marshall Billingslea, then the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict, to Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s former policy chief. “Doug,” he writes, “We have been sort of underwhelmed by the quality of the leaflets dropped over Iraq. Most of them are boring.”

Billingslea proposes sending the new leaflet designs to U.S. Central Command as “food for thought.”

U.S. forces dropped millions of “surrender” leaflets during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the classic psyops tool has also been used extensively in the subsequent counterinsurgency. During fighting in Sadr City this spring, U.S. and Iraqi helicopters blanketed the area with leaflets encouraging local residents to turn against Shia militia members.

[IMAGE: U.S. Department of Defense via The Memory Hole]

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