Fallujah in Focus

In 2004, the American military conducted two disastrous assaults in Fallujah, Iraq. More than 1,000 citizens were killed, 23 of Fallujah’s 28 neighborhoods were uninhabitable, and according to the military’s own estimate, upwards of 200,000 people were displaced because of the violence. Yet, despite this human catastrophe, the kind of information that emerged in the public domain during the battle foregrounded the soldier experience in war while effacing the destruction of Iraqi bodies. As it happens, this tendency to foreground the soldier body is a direct result of the military’s intervention into what they conceptualize as the information environment. This project draws from the second assault in Fallujah as a case study to explicate the military’s investment in this perspectival space, which is a consequence of both the mediatization of contemporary war and the need to modify knowledge considered unfavorable to military operations. In short, the military enlists the media into their targeting process to produce information that is then deployed as persuasive force to modify the beliefs of specific target populations. When the cultural texts produced by the media are remediated in the public domain after war, they can be thought of as martial constructs because they originated through the military’s systemized attempt to influence knowledge during war. That is, these texts trace to a specific battlefield objective. This project reframes the notion of propaganda as a generalized public relations strategy to a more acute and coordinated attempt to decontextualize specific knowledge in the information environment.