12.20.2005

bcc: All

I'm going to start off by saying this isn't like me. Some things are meant to be personal, and politics are touchy at best. But this is fun.

I'll say that while I certainly lean to the left, i don't necessarily subscribe to a standard set of political principles. I'm a "practical liberal" i guess. Pratically liberal? Maybe. Regardless, this is sweet.

A few weeks ago Chairman Bush presented his "National Strategy For Victory In Iraq," which was more or less a huge PR campaign to try and regain a smidgen of public opinion regarding this mess of a war. Before I lose your attention, here's the cool part. It's available from http:// www.whitehouse.gov . Download it yourself if you want: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_national_strategy_20051130.pdf ! Don't worry, I already did. Go to File / Document Properties and check out the author. It's "Feaver_P."

Why is this interesting? Well, Peter Feaver is "an experton public opinion about war, not war itself" (Nicolas Kristof, NY Times last week). he's a Duke University professor, and is the original author of this document.

It's just amazing that despite the absolute barrage of criticism this administration has received, it wouldnt' do it's homework and fix this little piece of metadata.

I wasn't the one clever enough to discover this, and there are about a billion blogs out there with a lot of commentary, but this excerpt from a particularly salient one is worth reading:

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Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.


So, if you are the president, after receiving this news, do you :

A) Convene a top to bottom strategic review of your war efforts in Iraq, seeking feedback from commanders in the fields, expert military strategists and the Pentagon to ensure you are on the right track for ultimate victory; or

B) Deliver a fake "Major Address on the War" on a stage with quasi-facist set dressing in front of a crowd of uniformed soldiers legally required to cheer for you and then release a propaganda document disguised as a strategic plan whose every third word is "Victory"?

If you have any question which road this White House took, let me be the first to congratulate you on your recent recovery from a five year coma:

That finding, ....was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone,


"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties... The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

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I'm just happy we're ignoring the genocide in Darfur, and headlines like this

Sweet dreams,
jb