SHOOTING WAR began as a serialized web comic here on SMITHMAG.net in May 2006. What was to be a short online preview of the story expanded to 11 bi-weekly chapters as reader and media interest grew. Earlier this year, the web comic was nominated for an Eisner Award.

In the fall of 2006, the story was acquired by Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books) for publication as a hardcover graphic novel in North America and in the U.K. by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Think of the web comic as a sort of beta version of the book. We ended up remastering every panel from the online version, reworking the storyline and the political context, some of which came as a result of suggestions from our loyal readers on this site. The full-color 192-page hardcover graphic novel takes the story to its dramatic conclusion and features over 110 pages of new material, including all new plots twists and, by popular demand, more Dan Rather than you can shake a dead armadillo at.

The original (unedited) web comic chapters can we viewed here.

The book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

A scathing near-future satire of the Iraqi occupation that rings with eerie plausibility, this Web comic-to-print hardcover collection follows a cocky young journalist named Jimmy Burns, who finds himself video-blogging across the front lines of Iraq in the year 2011. An accidental Internet celebrity transplanted suddenly to the Baghdad battlefields, Jimmy quickly progresses from arrogant to regretful, then jaded—in short, he is America in Iraq.

As the world slowly disintegrates around him, Jimmy finds himself caught between the competing agendas of Muslim insurgents, the American military and a sensational cable news network as they all clamor for blood on the battlefields. Journalist and first-time graphic novelist Lappé takes obvious delight in skewering all three with a whip-smart, left-leaning indictment of both American media and foreign policy that offers little hope and fewer heroes.

The bleak prognostications are cut with black humor and a penchant for explosions that keep the narrative moving.

The collection adds 110 pages of new content to the Web version, and Goldman's art, a cinematic blend of photography and digital painting, is framed in widescreen panels that lend an air of video documentary to a grim graphic novel that manages to make media—and the truth—seem more fluid than ever.

Shooting War

After five years as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I joined the Army because I wanted a challenge. I wanted adventure. Then I started basic training on September 11, 2001, and got more than I expected. After serving multiple tours in Iraq—patrolling city streets in the dead of night, hunting down insurgents, shooting at the enemy and being shot at—I will never be the same.

Soldier: Texas Monthly July 2008

How we learned to stop worrying and love surveillance

The Spy Who Blogged Me

Observing government surveillance of individual citizens from her perch in Quebec, human-rights lawyer Webb wonders how long democracy can survive when power-hungry officials are able to persecute innocent men and women as well as the occasional terrorist. Webb focuses her criticism on the governments of Canada and the United States, but persuasively documents international cooperation on illegal, or at least immoral, high-tech information gathering. Webb devotes substantial space to the National Security Agency of the U.S and its monitoring of international telephone traffic despite apparent lawlessness and ethical violations. Webb also writes in detail about how governments, following the lead of the Bush administration, use "terrorism" as an excuse to "serve agendas that go far beyond security from terrorism--namely the suppression of dissent, harsh immigration and refugee policies, increased law enforcement power," and the consolidation of political power within governments and in exerting control over national populations. Dense writing makes the book difficult to follow at times, and the alarmist tone is, well, alarming. But it does ring true.

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World

The author discusses several types of wars of ideas in an effort to achieve a better understanding of what wars of ideas are. That knowledge, in turn, can help inform strategy. It is important to note, for instance, that because ideas are interpreted subjectively, it is not likely that opposing parties will “win” each other over by means of an ideational campaign alone. Hence, physical events, whether intended or incidental, typically play determining roles in the ways wars of ideas unfold, and how (or whether) they are end. Thus, while the act of communicating strategically remains a vital part of any war of ideas, we need to manage our expectations as far as what it can accomplish.

Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas

Did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

Some counterpoints to this 'theory':

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers portrays the urban warfare between Algerians and the French troops occupying their country.

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas," read the flier.

Modern urban terrorism began in Algiers, and one result of that development was France's creation of a monstrous, chaotic, military apparatus of torture to use any means necessary to dismantle the terrorist cells. Did torture succeed in Algiers because the paras were dealing with a small population in a cordoned-off area?

One wonders.

Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian filmmaker who explored terrorism and torture in colonial Algeria in the powerful and influential 1965 classic, “The Battle of Algiers,” died here on Thursday. He was 86.

The parallels between the Algerian war and modern warfare are striking, and lessons can be extracted from French successes and failures in its drive to contain and manage the Algerian uprising.

RE: Was Grand Theft Auto IV Inspired by Al-Qaida?

Islamist forums are abuzz with a new theory: The designers of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, they say, were inspired by killing methods developed by al-Qaida. But did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

YouTube doesn't lie.

Was Grand Theft Auto IV Inspired by Al-Qaida?

The Europeans say that for them, the argument is not theoretical.

Al Qaeda threat has analysts split into 2 opposing camps

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are doing a far better job of expanding their insurgency than the United States and its allies are of trying to stop it.

Militants' rise in Pakistan points to opportunity lost

Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, had a different take on the pictures. She thought the "torture photographs" of Abu Ghraib were typical expressions of a brutalized popular American culture, coarsened by violent pornography, sadistic movies and video games, and a narcissistic compulsion to put every detail of our lives, especially our sexual lives, on record, preferably on public record. To her the Abu Ghraib photos were precisely the true nature and heart of America. She wrote:

Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

Many liberal-minded people would have shared instinctively not only Sontag's disgust but also her searing indictment of modern American culture. One of the merits of Errol Morris's new documentary on the Abu Ghraib photographs, and even more of the excellent book written by Philip Gourevitch in cooperation with Morris, is that they complicate matters. What we think we see in the pictures may not be quite right. The pictures don't show the whole story. They may even conceal more than they reveal. By interviewing most of the people who were involved in the photographic sessions, delving into their lives, their motives, their feelings, and their views, then and now, the authors assemble a picture of Abu Ghraib, the implications of which are actually more disturbing than Sontag's cultural critique.

Ghosts - The New York Review of Books