The wife and I saw Control Room over the weekend. Not only is it a compelling film, it’s also required viewing for anyone who wants to understand the mentality behind Al Jazeera. On a deeper level, it reminds us that a huge part of the war that we are fighting is a war of public relations. And make no mistake: this is not primarily a war of ideas. It’s also a war of images — of perception.

And we are losing this war badly.

Case in point: by far the most likable person in the film is Lt. (now Capt.) Josh Rushing, a U.S. press officer. He is earnest and credible. He’s an American with his heart clearly in the right place. He’s a Marine who advocates the American position, and is frustrated with the unfair portrayal of our efforts in Iraq — but also understands that our problems in the region have deep roots, among them the Israel/Palestinian issue. He clearly respects the Iraqi people, and wants badly to communicate to those people that we are there to help them. He also wishes that Al Jazeera would tell Arabs more about the evils of Saddam’s regime, to put the horrors of the war in perspective.

In a moving moment, Lt. Rushing thoughtfully describes his reaction to footage of injured and dead Iraqis, as compared to his stronger reaction to similar footage of Americans. He says that, when he realized that he cared more about the dead Americans, it bothered him, and made him realize that he hates war. But, he adds, he is not convinced that we can yet live in a world without war.

Lt. Rushing is compassionate, well-spoken, and portrays an image of absolute trustworthiness. In short, he is the face that we want to portray to the world — especially the Arab world.

And guess what? The Pentagon is silencing him.

Yup. You can read about it in a Salon.com article titled Muzzling a Marine (viewing of annoying commercial required):

Rushing comes across as a sympathetic character in the movie — earnest and thoughtful, a patriot and a skeptic — with shrewd observations about partisan media coverage (Al Jazeera and Fox) and the failure of U.S. media to fully explain what is happening in the Middle East. But now the Pentagon has silenced Rushing, 31, ordering him not to comment on the movie. And as a result, the 14-year career military man, recently promoted to captain, plans to leave the Marines, his wife told Salon in an interview Thursday.

The director of the film, Jehane Noujaim, is disappointed with the Marine Corps’ decision:

“The smartest thing the Marine Corps could do right now is to have him as their spokesperson,” she says. “He’s someone who blasted apart all of my stereotypes about the military; he’s somebody who, on a daily basis, interacted with Arab reporters — he was on both sides — and he’s somebody with a great deal of useful insight into what was going on. I don’t understand it.”

. . . . She also added that Rushing is a compelling figure not only for Americans, but for Arabs as well. “People trusted him,” she says, and for Arab viewers, he comes across as someone who has the potential to change the way they look at the American military. “And he was really excited about talking to the lefty press. These are channels that the U.S. military doesn’t address very often, and it was very disappointing to me that he was just silenced.”

If this is how we are waging our war of images and ideas, we are going to lose, folks.

One related point: the Al Jazeera executives in the film defend their broadcasting of wounded and dead Iraqis, arguing that this is true journalism. Clearly, the way Al Jazeera relentlessly broadcasts these images — showing them before every cutaway to a commercial — does not serve the highest ideals of journalism. Still, the executives have something of a point. There has been a virtual embargo on such images here in the U.S. And that’s a real problem.

One reason is that, when a blatant propagandist like Michael Moore shows these images in a film like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” people witnessing these images may be seeing them for the first time. They may feel lied to by our press, which they will correctly suspect has hidden these images, for the most part. This confers a false sense of legitimacy upon the rest of Moore’s dishonest movie. Unsophisticated moviegoers cannot be blamed for thinking: “If Moore is the first person to tell me the truth about the horrors of this war, maybe he’s the first person to tell me the truth about all these other things as well.”

That’s not good.

As a reluctant supporter of this war, I hate it when people oppose the war by telling lies. But it also disturbs me that we are having the full truth hidden from us as well. Let the opponents of the war make truthful arguments, and let one of those arguments be that there is a true human cost to this war.

And yes, we the supporters of the war must then respond with our own truthful arguments, regarding the horrors that took place in Iraq before the war, and that would still be occurring there if we had not invaded.

Wouldn’t it be nice if U.S. Marine Capt. Josh Rushing were one of the people out there making this argument on our behalf?