Bush & Co. Must Learn to Fight on the Information Battlefield
Bush & Co. Must Learn to Fight on the Information Battlefield to be Effective in the War on Terror - Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News.
Quote:
... Cultures shaped by the printed word prized logic, reason and dispassion. But a global culture conditioned by television - which is to say, by the power of sound and image - to process information a certain way, McLuhan taught, will revert to pre-modern modes of thought...
It will be more emotional, more tribal, less trusting of traditional authority and more inclined to privilege individual judgment. And it will have more political and religious extremism. Under the right circumstances, mass opinion can be mobilized quickly against traditional authority figures, who must have the means to adapt with haste to the new information environment if they wish to hold on to their power to influence events and thus to conserve their own power...
The U.S. government is like the queen, cluelessly clinging to a media and public relations strategy best suited for the day before yesterday. The president put in charge of public diplomacy an old friend, Karen Hughes, whose best-known sortie in this job was a "listening tour" of the Mideast that more or less flopped...
More for discussion at the link...
Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University
http://libraries.slu.edu/sc/ong/
Yes, Marc, I had to read some of this in Psych classes :eek:
It was indeed interesting though.
Message discipline and Certitude
I think that part of the problem in conveying foreign policy goals (and risks) has been an insistence on speaking with one voice and taking a confident, certain stance - especially when it isn't warranted.
In the run up to Iraq, we were given stillborn debate and a constant, unilateral message: Saddam Hussein is a threat and we can defeat that threat quickly at an acceptable cost. Even after the occupation started to go south, confidence and message discipline continued. There is no widespread insurgency. Troops will come home soon. As they stand up, we'll stand down. It's not a civil war.
This kind of thing hurts credibility, even when you're right. Few people who think about it are going to believe that everyone in the defense department and intelligence community has the exact same assessment of the threat, or how the war will likely proceed. Instead of acknowledging debate and uncertainty, they anger critics by labelling them as treasonous or political opportunists. Angry critics talk louder instead of shutting up - even when those angry critics are wrong.
Now that they've been proven wrong, credibility is destroyed. Admissions of errors go some distance toward restoring lost credibility, however they continue the same credibility destroying practices. After the litany of wrong moves in Iraq, even people with absolutely no military background oppose the surge just because this administration proposed it. Serious threats, like North Korea and Iran, and serious problems, like the Congo and Darfur, go unresolved.
Credibility comes from having people believe what you say. This is hard enough when you're talking about present reality (the US Government does not engage in torture). It's harder when you're talking about the future. To have good credibility as a predicter of future event, you must be believable in how you say it, and you must be right at least some of the time.
Imagine if the run up to the Iraq war had gone more like this: "the intelligence services do not have a clear picture of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. The hard evidence is uncertain - it's even possible that he's disarmed his programs as he claimed. However, everyone knows that Saddam Hussein has lied many times before, and may be lying now. There is great debate about how we should respond. I believe, in the wake up the September 11 attacks, that we cannot tolerate even the possibility that this regime will equip terrorists with weapons that will inflict another devastating attack on our soil. Moreover, there is a moral case to be made that Saddam has caused terrible suffering among his own people - and is a great threat to his neighbors. He is also a great threat to the world economy. Because of this, I favor the use of military force to effect regime change in Iraq.
Regime change offers up other hopeful possibilities - a free Iraq may become a valued, democratic ally in the middle east.
However, there are grave dangers to an invasion. Many soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines will lose their lives. Many more will be terribly injured or crippled. Iraq is a country rife with many competing ethnic and religious groups, and it's possible these groups would turn on each other. It's certain that some of them would violently oppose our forces long after the main fighting is over. No one can tell for certain what will happen - but there is the possibility that we will be best on all sides by terrorists, gangs, and militias in a protracted guerrilla struggle. Moreover, Syria and Iran could be drawn into this conflict in a way that only hurts us. Iraq may not have a stable, friendly government and may instead have an unstable and hostile government. We may lose tremendous credibility among the nations of the world and we may even be defeated in the long run. However, I believe it is worth the risk and uncertainty to proceed. Making these judgments is what I was elected to do - and armed with the full facts I hope you will support me."
It's unlikely that in August or September of 2002 most Americans would have taken this worst case scenario to heart. It's more likely that, given the mood of the country, folks would have told the President to stop worrying and attack already. But if he'd prominently (and consistently) pointed out everything that could go wrong, he'd have tremendously more credibility now. For one thing, pointing this stuff out up front makes it look like a natural outgrowth of the invasion - "Side effects of Operation Iraqi Freedom may include terrorism, riots, looting, assassinations, decreased capacity for friendly international relations and sectarian violence." Those things would seem like they could have happened whatever we did, not that any of them were an outgrowth of our total incompetence at this kind of warfare.
If people have at least been told about the worst case scenario, then they are emotionally prepared for it. People went into this expecting something a lot like Desert Storm, instead they got something more like Vietnam - or a really violent Bosnia. But because the administration sold this as a painless no brainer, which it clearly wasn't, people feel betrayed and misled - even if they weren't. People you've betrayed and misled, and critics you've belittled and angered, aren't disposed to keep cutting you a lot of slack. Continue this process long enough and even your supporters won't help you because you don't have any left.
