Suicide Bombing Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

This has got to be one of the dumbest ideas I have seen during this entire Iraq war fiasco. A new American Public Service Announcement is currently in production. The PSA will urge Iraqis not to resort to suicide bombing. At a cost of 1 million dollars this PSA will be broadcast on Iraqi television this summer.

The PSA will feature Matrix like slow motion camera angles and will be slick and high tech. A paragraph from the Newsweek article about the PSA illustrates the buzz:

Onlookers were later asked to stand back as the pyrotechnic crew blew up a poor old Yugo coupe and stunt men and women, padded under their Arab garb, were thrust into the air with ropes and pulleys to simulate the impact of a bomb exploding. "We all watch it on the evening news," says 900 Frames partner Drew Plotkin, "but we’re using a 120-camera set up that was used in films like ‘The Matrix.’ It gives a frozen-in-time feeling. Instead of seeing a flash and ambulances racing to the scene, we’re showing the street right before the attack, during and right after. That will communicate the horror, the carnage, the human toll these attacks take on innocent civilians."

What a colossal waste of a million dollars!

I am wondering how many suicide bombers will watch the PSA and decide that it’s just too terrible and give up on the idea. Is the PSA more realistic than the actual carnage that occurs on a daily basis in Iraq? How many people saw the Matrix movies and decided to give up gunplay? I would venture that those movies may have even made it cool to dress up in black overcoats and shoot people.

I can’t help thinking that our approach to the war in Iraq is very much like this PSA. It’s more about images and the perception of reality than what is actually real. It’s this kind of thinking that makes one believe that a suicide bomber will be dissuaded by an ad telling him that suicide bombing kills people. It’s also this kind of thinking that makes one believe that Iraqis would greet Americans with flowers.

I wonder what the office of Public Diplomacy at the State Department thinks of this PSA. Is this "Good PR"?