by Greg Beato

"The Night of Bush Capturing" may sound like a sexytime dream collaboration between horny Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev and Joe Francis of "Girls Gone Wild" fame, but alas, it isn't. Instead, it's a first-person shooter where gamers brutally gun down badly Photoshopped posters of George W. Bush and Tony Blair while listening to the somber mid-tempo drone of jihadist drive-by anthems.

Released last month by the Global Islamist Media Front, a British-based
organization with ties to Al-Qaeda, "The Night of Bush Capturing" is available for free on the Internet. Advertisements for the game reportedly identify its target audience as "terrorist children."

Thus, the idea that videogames are the quickest route to youthful hearts and minds is apparently a universal one. In 2002, the U.S. government released "America's Army," the first of several taxpayer-funded titles the military uses to recruit potential enlistees. This fall, the creators of an apocalyptic showdown between Christians and non-believers called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" are planning to distribute a million copies of their title to churches nationwide, in an effort to convince teens that there is indeed a place for Apache helicopters and paramilitary eugenics in God's Kingdom.

Can videogames manufacture suicide bombers, infantrymen, and soul-saving Chrambos with any greater efficacy than they do garden-variety killers? No doubt a few sociologists are studying this question at this very moment, but until they arrive at an answer, here's a simpler proposition to prove: The one behavior that videogame usage definitely incites is -- drumroll, please -- more videogame usage. In 1971, when the first commercial videogame, "Computer Space," was introduced, the annual U.S. murder rate per 100,000 people was 8.6. Three and a half decades and and who knows how many trillion hours of simulated violence later, the annual U.S. murder rate per 100,000 people has dropped to 5.6. Meanwhile, the annual U.S. videogame market grew from $0 to $8.4 billion during the same period.

Perhaps the scariest thing about games like "The Night of Bush Capturing," then, is that there are so few of them, and that they're so poorly made they're simply not compelling enough to induce as much couch-barnacle passivity as they might. Surely, the U.S. Army could help rectify this situation by shifting its game development efforts to products aimed at the Mideast market, but are war games the best solution? After all, don't first-person shooters of any ideological stripe inevitably reinforce the mujahidin-friendly world-view that casts life as one long search-and-destroy mission and violence as the primary measure of purpose and accomplishment? Give "The Night of Bush Capturing" the Leisure Suit Larry makeover it practically begs for, however, and you'd have a much more powerful weapon in the fight for freedom.

After Saddam's fall, Newsweek reported in December 2003, adult DVD vendors, porn theaters, prostitution, and liquor bazaars blossomed in Iraq like beautiful daisies and daffodils in a long-barren desert. Of course, the country's religious extremists characterized these phenomena as nefarious American imports, as if Iraqis themselves have no indigenous appetites for modes of self-expression that do not involve prayer or improvised explosive devices. But obviously that's not the case. If you visit a theater that plays movies with sex scenes in them in Iraq, you might just wind up with a hand grenade in your popcorn, but even so, the demand for such fare remains strong.

Surely there are programmers in Iraq who would love a chance to develop games for their moderate countrymen, so why not support them? Ever since 9/11, the United States has been bludgeoning the Mideast with state-of-the-art brand-building artillery that invariably delivers an up-with-America! payload. Last year, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported on an ongoing Pentagon program wherein American military personnel write positive articles about the occupation in Iraq, then hand them off to a private sector company called the Lincoln Group which translates them and places them in Iraqi media outlets without identifying their source.

What Iraq could use more than covert (or overt) American cheerleading, however, is American-style media freedom without any lessons attached. Unfortunately, our rare attempts to facilitate such efforts generally meet with criticism. Take, for example, Radio Sawa, the U.S.-funded network that aims to "communicate with the youthful population of Arabic-speakers in the Middle East." In 2004, a State Department inspector general praised the network for attracting a large audience but faulted it for its failure to to present itself "as a tool for public diplomacy," completely missing the fact that as far as public diplomacy tools go, cross-pollinating the latest hits by from Field Mob and Jessica Simpson with homegrown Arabic pop is a pretty good one. Or as George Clinton almost once said, "Free your ass and your mind will follow."

Ultimately, state-scripted news media is just business as usual in Iraq, and try as he might, Donald Rumsfeld will never equal the achievements of Saddam and his sons in that realm. What's much more novel in Iraq, and much more powerful in terms of its democratizing influence, no doubt, is pop culture unmitigated by any particular government agenda. As soon as someone creates the first Mideastern "Everquest" or the first Mideastern "Sims 2," the region will invariably grow safer. When you're spending forty hours a week pursuing a pair of silver-scribed plate boots in the wilds of Antonica, you simply don't have as much time for sectarian violence anymore. The Shiite fundamentalists who've declared a War on Racy Movies and other pop culture in Iraq understand this; perhaps one day our leaders will too.