It took 25 years for propaganda wars to catch up with the Gulf war

This video of John Cantlie, prisoner of IS, reporting live from Kobani is a first on many accounts. Released today it shows the Islamic State completely caught up with the latest in propaganda.

Almost a quarter of a century passed from the first bombs on Baghdad to the current battle for Kobani and strangely enough the tools of war hardly changed. Yes there are drones now, but other than that it are still B1 bombers, cruise missiles, ordinary artillery and Kalashnikovs which determine the outcome of conflicts all over the world.

The tools of propaganda though reached a new high at the first Gulf war in '91 when we could see greenish images of the bombing runs on the city of Baghdad and CNN's Peter Arnett covered it live on CNN from the rooftop of his hotel.

We were treated to first 'person' videos of so called smart bombs destroying military targets. We were led to believe that war had became chirurgical. No real people were killed or even involved. Just a cross-mark on a head up display seconds before another enemy target was destroyed. Yet another playstation kill accomplished.

That very same chirurgical image of neat killings was disrupted by Peter Arnett who visited the wreckages of houses, schools, even hospitals. The propaganda war reached a new high and the Pentagon learned an important lesson. Don't show the killings as someone will go to the scene and prove you wrong.

Nowadays the Western powers fly sorties in a theatre. Nobody gets killed anymore. The pentagon sometimes vaguely reports hitting 'Isil compounds', but is no longer boasting about this destroying of the sleeping quarters of the rebels. Death hidden in weasel words.

So we went a long way from Vietnam where the commies just represented the evil empire and enemy kills was the benchmark of progress to wars which were renamed 'conflicts' where casualties were an anomaly we all preferred to keep quiet.

Long rant leading to the latest Islamic State video shown below. They finally caught up with the West in terms of effective propaganda. A better looking version of Peter Arnett is doing a stand up report from Ayn al Islam (which the Kurds and suddenly the West call Kobani).

In the Western media this will be called a scripted video under force (but Peter Arnett was equally accused of being a puppet of Saddam) and they would be right. However the effect on millions of viewers will be different. Here we see a proper Brit with the right accent explaining "_Urban warfare is as about as nasty and tough as it gets, and it's something of a speciality of the mujahideen._"

IS claims victory by using the Western tools of propaganda. A drone used to film Ayn al Islam, a warm, comforting voice, a cinematography resembling stand-ups by CNN and other professional networks and a narrative which leads the viewer into the inevitable victory of the Islamic State.

TL;DR It's a shame John Cantlie as a hostage to IS has to do this, but it's a sign of the times where propaganda tools finally match those of the Western powers. #Politics