Posted on 05/20/2007 3:24:17 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
In today's Friday's NY Times, David Brooks presents some disturbing food for thought:
The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It’s destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair’s government in Britain, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel and Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq. And here’s a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well.
That’s because setbacks in the war on terror don’t only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They’re structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to take on and defeat nation-states.
Brooks' opening paragraphs touch on a few key insights from earlier this week. First, the very nature of a guerilla insurgency is that it is light on its feet. Free of confining media and bureaucratic scrutiny, lawless insurgent groups constantly find ways to turn what their enemy views as strengths into vulnerabilities. They have, for instance, become quite adept at turning our free press into a propaganda machine to fuel more terrorist attacks, this despite evidence that more news coverage causes the number of attacks to rise.
Likewise, even knowing that they are actively providing the insurgency with thousands of dollars in free advertising has not caused the media to rethink their one-sided coverage of the war:
In an article in the February 17th issue, Munro looks at the dollar value of US news accounts that cover insurgent attacks: the American media is, in effect, providing free advertising for the Iraqi insurgency. He discusses the recent murder of an Iraqi comedian:
Public-relations professionals routinely rate the success of a publicity event by adding up the volume of news coverage it generates, and then calculating the cost of a comparable amount of advertising space or time. In this case, Hassan's killers scored a 26-column-inch, page one spread in The Washington Post, plus a 10-inch, two-column photo on the inside jump page. The Post charges about $556 per column-inch for ads inside the newspapers, so the 36 inches of space could have cost an advertiser about $20,000. The Post also ran the story on its web site. The paper declined to say how much a similar amount of Web space would cost an advertiser, but other major newspapers charge about $20 per 1.000 online visitors. If 650,000 people clicked on The Post's site that day, the advertising value of the online story would have been about $13,000.
The murder was highlighted or mentioned by other newspapers, major and minor, across the country including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The St. Petersburg Times, the LA Times, and the Kansas City Star.
...So, for a $6,000 investment, Hassan's killers earned as much as $100,000 in what they would deem to be free publicity in the United States. That's at least a sixteenfold return-on-investment.
...In contrast, US and Iraqi forces had a harder time during the same period getting positive publicity for their work against insurgents. On November 30, for instance, Iraqi officials announced the arrests of an infamous sniper and 30 of his followers. The group gained notoriety because it often videotaped its attacks on US troops, dubbed them in English, and posted them on Internet sites where they were picked up by Arab TV stations and also by CNN.
The snipers knew the value of the videos. The Financial Times quoted one of them as saying, "The idea of filming the operations is very important...The scene that shows the falling solder when hit has ore impact on the enemy than any other weapon.". But according to Nexis, the November announcement of the snipers' arrests was not cited in any US news reports.
But perhaps the most important insight to be gained from Brooks' piece is that there is no one plan that will work against such a decentralized organization, no "overall strategy" that, once chosen, we can simply adhere to until they are defeated. This is a war of attrition in which we must constantly adapt to a changing battlefield and a nimble foe who will continually find new ways to confound us. As Tigerhawk long ago wrote, the enemy's strategy is no mystery; it is to vex and exhaust us, to foment defeatism and division at home so our civilian leadership will lose heart and withdraw our soldiers from the field, leaving them in control.
If we focus only on exploding car bombs, and ignore the fact that families are moving back to Baghdad neighborhoods in droves, we miss the fact that these bombs are failing of their intended effect.
If we are unduly dismayed when we read in the NY Times of a chlorine attack in al Anbar, but are never told that there is virtually no gunfire there for the first time in years or that Sunni sheiks are coming over to our side, we lose the miracle of the Anbar Awakening.
If we let the unrelenting rain of bad news on our TV screens daunt our resolve here at home, we likewise miss the point; that such attacks have precisely that goal in mind: to exhaust our fragile will. And that fatal refusal to see that this is a war of attrition between a large, wealthy nation with almost inexhaustible resources (but a complacent and spoiled populace) and a vastly poorer enemy with limited resources (but almost boundless determination) is all that is necessary to defeat us.
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The world has worked this way for millenia. The only way to defeat these kinds of insurgencies that I know of historically has been genocide or population transfer.
Look at Saddam’s campaign against the Shi’ite marshlands or the US against filipino rebels for examples of successful counterinsurgency tactics. They weren’t pretty by any means, but they worked.
Iraq PING
Yeah, amoung the DBM/dems. So what? Thank heaven's Bush was Prez. when this war started. Can you imagine what we would have now if prix like this were in charge?!
That's the most vexing thing about the Iraq disaster. The ahistorical, millenialist character of the project.
History is replete with examples of how to deal with barbarian tribes. They can't help the raids, the plunder, the rapine - they're barbarians, that's what they do.
And if they are unchecked, eventually they can plunder Rome.
But they are not supermen, and they're not devoid of human feeling. When enough of their women and children are killed, and enough of their land seized, plowed, and salted, and enough of their primitive dwellings razed, they quit for a few centuries. That's because they're barbarians, and that's also what barbarians do.
George W. Bush and his advisers are unwilling - obviously so - to resist the current barbarians in a way that the barbarians can comprehend. So they've invented a liberal internationalist fantasy in which the barbarians can be transformed into civilized people by some sort of military demonstration combined with incentives.
This has never been done, anywhere in the world, at any time in history.
But we're going to pull it off.
How can anyone be so stupid?
We need a unique keyword that we use for all articles that y’all ping the list to.
For the Duke lacrosse attempted railroading, I came up with DUKELAX pretty early on, and started keyword tagging all the articles thus. It caught on and stuck.
Worthwhile idea? Any ideas for a keyword?
infowar
Uh, let me finish your thought....tell me if I get this right....
This has never been done, anywhere in the world, at any time in history....ergo....it cannot be done.
This puts you squarely in the camp of the flat-earthers telling Columbus he's nuts, sending Galileo to jail, and other historically naysayers about curing polio, to man flying to man landing on the moon.
In human events, nobody could've imagined that George Washington's ragtag Army would grow up to paddle back across the ocean and end two european wars.
Finally, the nature of history is that to be first at something, anything, the key requirement is that nobody has done it before.
Can the mohammedist barbarians be civilized? Yes, since many already live under some sense of order in various countries, including Egypt and Turkey. Is this war the way to get it done in the rest of the ME? Maybe, maybe not.
Yeah, Jim, if only we were as smart as you. What a wonderful world it would be.
An important aspect to remember is our media culture.
As a society, we have been brought up to believe that entire wars can be fought and resolved in a single television episode or a full-length movie.
Patience for long-term strategy is not a modern American trait.
My view is that the burden of proof is on those who propose novel solutions to complex human problems, and that, when the issue is war and survival of the nation, that things that have worked in the past are better than novelties.
You want to make these barbarians civilized the way it is (not) being done in Iraq?
Show me the data.
Sold.
“infowar”
Concur
This article is nuts. Terrorists are not superhuman; historically they thrive only as long as free societies allow them to thrive.
I’ll willingly give the terrorists our media — as long as we’re killing most of their leaders and boxing them in. Problem in iraq has been one of proportion. We fight propotionately, they do not. A loosening of the rules of engagement a la WWII to allow shoot on sight and field executions, as well as immediate destruction of all terrorist havens including whole sections of cities (sadr baghdad for instance) would end this thing in 90 days.
Newsflash: It ain't 1945 anymore, bubba. Iraq is supposed to be our ally, meaning we can't nuke Fallujah and irradiate large swaths of the Middle East until the bad guys come and sign a surrender document on the deck of the USS Missouri.
Who do you want to shoot on sight?
Who do you want to execute in the field?
I must have missed the history lesson where we destroyed the capital city of one of our allies in WWII.
You would willingly give the enemy our media because you do not understand that it is media and psychological conditioning that prevents us from out-terrorizing the terrorists.
Figure out who is giving aid and comfort to these insurgents... and be prepared to deliver a tactical bomb/response whenever we suffer an attack. MAD worked during the Cold War and a version of it will work in this war. Yes, it needs to be updated and we need to do everything we can to limit “collateral damage”, but we need to use our strengths to counter those of the insurgents. We’ll never get the media to help us in this battle, but maybe the news of our “retribution” will inspire the Radical Islamic Street to apply some counter-pressure.
Who do I want us to shoot on sight? Easy - known terrorists who we cannot currently shoot under existing ROE.
And why NOT destroy certain cities? It’s a damned war.
Please tell me exactly which iraq is our ally?
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