Fear as A Political Motivator

[marct]

Hi RA,

You need the word "most" in front of professionals. People who were getting paid a lot of money decided that "you're either with us or against us."

Call me old fashioned, but I don't use the term "professional" as a noun in reference to whether or not people get paid; I use it to refer to a vocation and an attitude .

Our predictions about the semantic reaction to "shock and awe" were way off.

Not really, they were spot on except that the predictors forgot that a semantic reaction is temporally immediate. In the case of Iraq, I would say the effect lasted from 2-5 months.

The main reason that I think we shouldn't do "voluntary univited nation building" is that by invading a country we change the semantic reactions of the public to our best efforts.

Gotta agree with Ken on this one . After all, the first time you guys tried it, we whupped your b***s back across the border .

Having said that, I think we did a suburb job of changing the German public's semantic reaction to Hitler. The military deserves a lot of the credit. Marc, can you think of any other good examples?

Shortish term. There is a lot of underground support for Hitler as a backlash against the increasingly PC doctrine "culture" in Germany. This has been compounded by Bush's attempts to get the Germans more involved in Afghanistan. I remember one German minister telling me he thought it was "amusing" how the US spent 50 years telling Germany to be "nice" and now they "want us to be militarists".

Still, I think the best examples, from the US point of view, are Germany and Japan. I still think that one of the best examples overall is Quebec and, in the "crush them all" school of COIN, Provence.