General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, has delivered testimony to the United States House of Representatives on the Iraq war alongside Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Baghdad.
In his report on Monday on the effectiveness of a US troop buildup in Iraq, which is to be followed by testimony in front of the Senate a day later, Petraeus said: “This war is not only being fought on the ground in Iraq but also in cyberspace.”
The general said his recommendations for the way forward in Iraq to his chain of command and the US military Joint Chiefs of Staff stressed “the need to contest the enemy’s growing use” of the internet to “spread extremism”.
“Regional, global, and cyberspace initiatives are critical to success” in Iraq, he said.
As-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s media production wing, released a video on Friday ahead of the general’s congressional testimony and Wednesday’s quarterly White House report, which purported to show Osama bin Laden warning George Bush against repeating the “mistakes of the former Soviet Union”.
In an unprecedented shutdown and a possible show of US online might, the Associated Press news agency reported that all the websites that usually carry statements from al-Qaeda went down and were inaccessible soon after Washington announced it had obtained the new video.
While the reasons for the shutdown remain unknown, the United States has shutdown numerous so-called extremist websites in the past.
Evan H Kohlmann, a security expert from GlobalTerroralert.com, however, said he suspected it was the work of al-Qaeda itself, trying to find how the video leaked to US officials.
While the testimony by Petraeus and Crocker was heavily covered by US and international press, little has been made of his remarks on cyber-warfare.
One Turkish news site, based in Maryland, called out cyber war as a key point of the US security strategy in Iraq, while Tribe.net members called the general out on his 1997 William Gibson-inspired language.
In blogs, novelist Matthew Funk dubbed Petraeus’s emphasis on cyberspace a “flash of Petraeus genius” for taking aim at al-Qaeda’s information assets.
Funk said: “This is a War on Anger more than it is a War on Terror, and Petraeus knows that in such a fight the message is a better weapon than a missile.”
Meanwhile, cyberspace took the Iraq war to print on Monday, with the website MoveOn.org printing a full-page ad in the New York Times posing the question: “General Petraeus or General Betray US?”
The ad, which both US Democrats and Republican were quick to denounce, accused the general of “cooking the books for the White House.”
The full text of Petraeus’s testimony can be downloaded in PDF format from Politico.com, as can Crocker’s report.