Actually, a bunch of us who have been severely critical of Tim Rutten are probably kind of awestruck by his column today in the L.A. Times.

Lebanon photos: Take a closer look

THE controversy this week over Reuters’ distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled and — probably — staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn’t been nearly as large as it should have been.

Holy cow.

Rutten is the man who I criticized for thinking of the journalistic profession as a priesthood.

He said:

There is a certain kind of bright but brittle mind that loves this sort of either/or thinking. What such minds cannot accept is the common-sensical notion that real life — including that of the press — is lived mostly in the pragmatic middle. There, experience has demonstrated that intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline enable journalists to gather and report facts with an impartiality that — though sometimes imperfect — is good enough to serve the public’s interest in the generality of cases.

I said:

Rutten seems to have missed that whole Reformation thing; the notion that truth might not have to be derived from a priesthood – and make no mistake, when he starts talking about ‘intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline ,’ he’s talking about a priesthood – is something that went by the wayside in Western society a number of years ago. Frighteningly, it appears to be coming back.

Today, I tip my hat to him. Not because he said something that supports position I’ve taken (although that’s nice), but because he’s willing to publicly complain about this:

There are, however, two problems here, and they’re the reason this controversy shouldn’t be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media’s grudging response to the revelation of Hajj’s misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson’s website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj’s photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there’s anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

Well said. Rutten may feel there is a priesthood of journalists, but he sees that it needs to police it’s own, or else the laity will do it for them. I’m thrilled to hear him say that, and I’ll go put on a hat so I can tip it.

Meanwhile I’ll go see if Mrs. Patterico can throw some ice water on Patrick and bring him out of his dead faint.

You were in L.A. got to go to Coop’s and Gale Banks’, had my phone number and didn’t invite me!!

Great. Now I know where I rate. You’ll pay, he said darkly, you’ll pay.

I’m so ronrey…

…and gets some career advice himself. The interview will run on 60 Minutes Sunday.

Mike Wallace in 2006:

Of Ahmadinejad, Wallace said, “He’s an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell.”

Wallace said he was surprised to find that the Iranian president was still a college professor who taught a graduate-level course.

“You’ll find him an interesting man,” he said. “I expected more of a firebrand. I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels … about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected.”

[emphasis added]

You know I’m going to bring this back up, don’t you?

Mike Wallace in 1987:

Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

Some things speak for themselves, don’t they?

I wrote this a little while ago, had some dialog with neo-neocon about it (it touches on her domain pretty closely, and I believe she will have a parallel piece soon), and then two things combined to get me to pull it out, add a few things, and put it out here for discussion.

Obviously, one of the things was the murder in Seattle, in which a – troubled – young Muslim man shot up a Jewish Federation office in Seattle; an office much like the one where my mom used to work here in Los Angeles.

Another was an interview by Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog with filmmaker Pierre Rehov, who just finished a documentary on shahids (suicide bombers).

…I became fascinated with the personalities of those who had committed those crimes, as they were described again and again by their victims. Especially the fact that suicide bombers are all smiling one second before they blow themselves up.

In my original post on Seattle, I asked if the assailant had been a “mucker” – someone who simply went amok from the strains of modern life (the word comes from John Brunner’s great ripoff of Dos Passos – “Stand on Zanzibar”). In Brunner’s 2010, muckers are common enough that they are discussed like the weather.I continue to focus on this issue because I believe that while we have to continue to degrade the military forces arrayed against us, the core battle is against an ideological movement, and that when we can defang the movement, defeating the military will be No Big Thing.

I think we need to understand this phenomenon better, and while there are obviously political understandings that are critical to that, there are also psychological ones as well. I’ve argued for along time that the mindset we see in Islamist rage isn’t only present there, but is present in a wider – if less intense – form here in the West as well. I’ve called it ‘Bad Philosophy’, and suggested that building a ‘Good Philosophy’ is as important as building weapons and armies. Maybe more so.

I’m going to ask for all of your help on this, because I’m going to wind up walking closer to an edge of appropriateness than I’m necessarily comfortable, and if we take a wrong step in the comments, I’ll wind up stepping over the edge and have to pull back.

I’m going to talk about Bad Philosophy, violence and the threats of violence and suicide. I’m trying to make an abstract philosophical point, not to comment on the specifics of threats, violent acts, or specific suicides. If you comment, and it’s specific to a person, ask yourself a simple question: Would you email your comment to the mother of the person you’re commenting about? Would you do it if you liked the mother? If the answer is no, don’t post it. If I think the answer is no, I’ll reserve the right to yank the comment. If I can’t control the comments, I’ll close comments entirely. It’s my party, and in this case you’ll drink what I pour; BYOB isn’t going to apply here.

Bear with me while I explain.

I assume you’ve been following the recent and ongoing hoo-hah over at Jeff Goldstein’s place, in which a – deranged – commenter goes off the deep end, and winds up quitting her job and moving to Eugene. No, really.

So I started putting clips together about blog-threats, and went back to the one time I’ve been threatened – as Rob Lyman pointed out, being the Armed Liberal may cut down on that kind of chatter – back in 2002.

PLEASANT SURPRISES

I’ve harshed Hesiod and Sullywatch over language and tone, and while I’ve been impressed at the work Charles at LGF does in bringing Middle Eastern news to light, I’ve got issues with his comments section; the omnipresent tone of Arab-bashing and chest-beating, at a time when we need to proceed with determination, care, and seriousness is part of what led to my ‘thought experiment’ below (and which I’ll follow up on as time allows today).

Then this charming set of comments over at Aaron’s ‘Uppity Negro’ blog was pointed out to me:

[sorry, crabby] I feel a collecting-spree coming on, & I’m afraid Armed Liberal’s blinky, doe-eyes are looking mighty fine. Can I have’em, Aaron? Can I?
Posted by: Neogrammarian on September 16, 2002 05:21 PM

As long as I can have the ears.
Those necklaces of them look quite fetching.
Posted by: Aaron on September 16, 2002 05:41 PM

So, trying to figure out how to comment on them, I can only think of one response…molon labe, kids, molon labe.

[a few folks wanted to know what ‘molon labe’ meant…I added a link]

So I wander over to Aaron’s blog to see what he’s up to lately, and discover to my shock that he’s dead. And I Google a bit, and discover that he’s likely a suicide.

And, sadly, I go “huh”. And I wonder about the role of this kind of undifferentiated social rage in suicide, and further the connection between the kind of philosophical anger I talk about when I discuss Bad Philosophy and real anger you see here expressed in the world – and that ultimately may be expressed toward oneself.

I’ve talked about “Bad Philosophy” in the past. Let me recap:

ROMANTICISM AND TERRORISM – AND A QUOTE FROM ISAIAH BERLIN:

You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it – this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.

No matter what it was: that is the important thing.

IS THE WAR ON TERROR THE WAR ON BAD PHILOSOPHY? with a quote from Baudrillard:

Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the is symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.

WHAT BAD PHILOSOPHY LOOKS LIKE with quotes from a Salon reader:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide — lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.

– Name withheld

These are all positions that come from a kind of spiritual hole, and seek to fill it with strong – even violent – action, as the purest expression of a self that is somehow battened down by the world.

I’ve believed for a while that the violent strains in Islamism come more from an infection with this Western disease than from intrinsic issues within Islam – although those issues may provide a fertile ground for the infection.

I don’t think – and have never thought – that it is limited to Islam, though. I think there is a strong strain of it in the West as well. And recent events have brought that to mind.

Because in reading the fascinating train wreck of a public life – the one being done by Deborah Frisch, lately of the University of Arizona, and headed for the Twilight Zone…I came on this (linked from the comments here):

I am about as unanonymous as they get, aardvark.

My name is Deborah Frisch. I live in Tucson, Arizona. I teach in the psychology department at the YOUkneeversity of AIRYzona.

You want to come find me, see that I’m real, hold a .357 magnum in my face, i say:

BRING IT ON.

Posted by: Deborah Frisch | Jan 3, 2005 8:02:40 PM

Posted by: DF

One day, some cheeky blogger is going to be offed by a psychopathic blogger. Will it be a scuffle@left2right? idunno.

i hope to hell it ain’t me, i gotta tell ya.

but i feel kind of guilty for not blowing myself up on the steps of the lincoln memorial when i lived in d.c. while i was doing out pork for sam..so in a way, i WANT some futhermucker A-hole to off me because i pissed him off in the blogosphere.

BRING IT ON, FUTHERMUCKERS!!!!!!!!

Posted by: DF | Jan 3, 2005 8:06:43 PM

And I start puzzling a few things together…

I do think there is a connection – between a bright, well-schooled but socially inept person like Dr. Frisch (whose name, as Goldstein has promised, will now become an Internet verb) and her fantasies of self- annihilation, and the forces that would lead a well-educated, middle class man like Mohammed Atta to commit suicide in the loudest, most attention-getting way he could envision.

Does this mean I think Dr. Frisch is a terrorist, or even remotely likely to actually be one? No. Let’s be clear and absolute about this; I’m using her public meltdown as an example of something I think is more common – if less extremely visible – than we expect, and that is a part of the social movement – a part ofthe intellectual fashion – that I think presents serious problems.

So there’s a process visible here that’s worth looking at with some interest, and she’s a handy example. In my view, it starts here:

The USA is a sick, diseased, cancer, blight on the earth. This is a fact. You guys are in denial about it and hate the fact that I’ve got the chutzpah to hang here and tell it like it is.

OK, I’ll disagree about the U.S. – but the interesting thing to me is this. If this how you feel about where you live – if your life is dependent on this blight, and you’re inextricably a part of it – what’s the logical reaction?

I’ve got to believe that it’s rage, and a rage that really, really wants to pierce the banality of things with violent, orgasmic action. And it’s a rage of the privileged, because it is the more bitter rage of the child against the parent; rage against that which made you, which comforted you, and which you know you owe a debt to, but somehow can’t seem to agree to pay.

This is entirely consistent with studies that have shown that terrorists preponderantly come from more advantaged, rather than less advantaged, backgrounds. In The New Republic, Kreuger and Maleckova write:

The evidence that we have assembled and reviewed suggests that there is little direct connection between poverty, education, and participation in or support for terrorism. Indeed, the available evidence indicates that compared with the relevant population, participants in Hizbollah’s militant wing in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Lebanon were at least as likely to come from economically advantaged families and to have a relatively high level of education as they were to come from impoverished families without educational opportunities. We should caution, however, that the evidence we have considered is tentative due to data limitations. In addition, our focus has been primarily on the Middle East, so our conclusions may not generalize to other regions or circumstances.

Still, less quantitative studies of participants in a variety of forms of terrorism in several different settings have reached a conclusion similar to ours. We are particularly struck by Charles Russell and Bowman Miller’s work in this regard. In 1983, to derive a profile of terrorists, they assembled demographic information on more than three hundred fifty individuals engaged in terrorist activities in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East from 1966 to 1976 based on newspaper reports. Their sample consisted of individuals from eighteen revolutionary groups known to engage in urban terrorism, including the Red Army in Japan, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the People’s Liberation Army in Turkey. Russell and Miller found that “the vast majority of those individuals involved in terrorist activities as cadres or leaders is quite well educated. In fact, approximately two-thirds of those identified terrorists are persons with some university training ,university graduates or postgraduate students.” They also report that more than two-thirds of arrested terrorists “came from the middle or upper classes in their respective nations or areas.”

And this process, this rage against the unsatisfying world, is the process we have to break – and we’ll only break it by providing a better process for these privileged sons and daughters to be a part of.

Our armies may buy us space to do this, but until we do, we’ll live in a false peace.

I never thought it’d Be this close. The Netroots flexes its muscles…

With 76% reporting, it’s Lamont 52%, Lieberman 48%.

Who do you think will be in the chair in the Dirksen come January??

Total turnout so far is about 205,000 out of 1.95 million registered voters.

So the Netroots can’t raise serious money and can’t turn out votes. Why do they remind me of Jean Hagen?

As of now (6:20pm Pacific) the results in Georgia look a little too good for Hank Johnson; I doubt that we’ll see an outcome this good at the end of the night:

With 13% of precincts reporting, it’s 73.8% for Johnson and 26.2% for McKinney (UPDATE: It finished out at about 60% – 40% for Johnson, still about a 5-6% larger margin than pre-election polls had shown).

If you want to catch the buzz of the evening, check out some of the folks liveblogging this:

* Tom Baxter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Political Insider” blog
* Andre Walker of “Georgia Politics Unfiltered”
* Jeff Emanuel of “Peach Pundit”

And of course, the blogger who kicked off the whole “we gotta get out of this place” push down in Geeorgia…

Will Hinton, “Dignan”

UPDATE2: Hank Johnson’s campaign called to thank us all. So… thank you, to everyone participated!

One of the issues bandied about has been that of “proportionality”, or for that fillip of insider jargon, the question of in jus bello, or justice in war.The issue is how one prosecutes a war, and the limitations imposed on the prosecution of war by the need to maintain moral legitimacy in victory.

The charge frequently made is set out (in a fairly rich post – he’s not watering down the moral issues at all) by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, who says:

…here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just—and just war theory says it is—but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited. And that looks crazy.

…

On the other side, though, it hardly seems to be satisfactory to say that non-conventional forces should be subject to weakened jus in bello restrictions, since the restrictions are there to protect those who have immunity from attack and whose immunity is not removed or diminished by the fact that one side or the other are militarily disadvantaged.

…

So I was interested to read a recent paper by David Rodin, “The Ethics of Asymmetric War” in The Ethics of War (eds Sorabji and Rodin). Rodin proposes to address the problem by strengthening the jus in bello constraints on the strong.

There are of course two broad questions. Just war theory, to a naive reading, ought to be about conducting war in a manner which allows for the possibility of peace afterward. The minimization of suffering is an end in itself, but this is not simply a calculus of pain. The basis for the laws of war were set down by the Greeks, because the alternative to war conducted in a manner showing some restraint was simply slaughter.

And slaughter did happen often enough.

The question is – can we fairly say that Israel (in Lebanon) and the United States (in Iraq) are behaving with restraint?

The picture at the top of the page is an aerial photo of a neighborhood in Beirut.

Here is that neighborhood after it was bombed by the Israelis (images from this site via Juan Cole, who misses the point as he so often does).

Juan suggests that this juxtaposition suggests that:

The difference between Ahmadinejad and Olmert is that the Iranian president is a blowhard. The one who had practical plans to wipe a country off the map was Olmert.

Juan is a history profesor so he ought to know better (yes, I know…). Here are some images from Wikipedia. I have cut and sized them in Photoshop, and raised the contrast a bit to make them more legible.

Frampol, Poland before being bombed by the Luftwaffe.

Frampol, Poland after being bombed by the Luftwaffe.

Cologne after the “Thousand-Bomber Raid”

Hamburg, after the firebombing.

We’re much better at area bombardment today – with conventional weapons. It would be easy for Israel to simply and literally flatten the neighborhoods in Beirut where Hizbollah is based.

The fact that they haven’t should buy them some standing in reviewing their in jus bello behavior. But somehow I doubt it.

If I get into a barfight with Mike Tyson, the fact that he hits harder than I do is less material than whether he hits as hard as he could have or harder than he needed to.

This pattern is repeated thoughout the conduct of this war, in the air and on the ground. Every day, Israeli and Coalition troops put themselves in unneeded danger in order to act with restraint and proportion.

It happens that these photos offer a quick way to make my point. Do awful things happen? Of course they do. It’s war. Am I saying “Gee, Israel hasn’t nuked them, so give them a break…” No, not even close.

I’m saying simply, that Israel (and the U.S.) are acting with some restraint.

The war that some commenters here look forward to won’t be restrained, and the aftermath will look much more like the World War II photos.

And that’s why I’d like to avoid it, and why I’ll support a restrained war in the hope that it can eliminate the conditions for an unrestrained one.

It’s a given that the current conflict is above all a media war. We’re fighting to change people’s perceptions and behavior, and attempting to do so without the level of violence that someone like Clauswitz was talking about when he said that “the object of war is to bend the enemy to your will”.

There are two debates going on right now around this. One involves media manipulation on both sides; one involves attempts to understand and ‘calibrate’ the level of violence we’d accept in the course of the combat in Iraq and Lebanon. I’ll talk about the latter in a bit.

In the first, there’s clear evidence that folks on the other side are managing the flow of information.

Start with this account from Anderson Cooper:

“This is a heavily orchestrated Hizbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they’ve been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That’s the story that Hizbollah wants people to know about.

These ambulances aren’t responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”

Note the picture associated with the story:

Go read the story – it’s what a good journalist would be reporting along with the direct reporting of what’s being shown him or her.

Now go to the ‘Drinking From Home‘ blog, and note the two pictures – of the same woman, bewailing the destruction of two different buildings on two different days.

For grins, I’d love to get a better picture of the similarly-dressed (yes, I know many religious Muslim women wear similar garb) woman in the CNN picture above…wouldn’t it be interesting to see if she’s the same woman?

Rusty Shackelford goes on to show that the Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj manipulated photos of Israeli fighters (captioned as firing missiles when actually shooting off an antimissile flare), as well as Photoshopped pictures of the bombed Lebanese landscape.

It’s clear that Hizbollah – like Al Quieda in general, including the forces we’re fighting in Iraq – are fighting an information war, and do so consciously.

And, I’ll argue, it has an impact.

The perception in the media is, variously, that they are implacable fighters while our soldiers are brutal killers and our efforts harm mostly civilians.

This perception is powerful both in its impact on us and our perception of – and so decisions about – the war, and on their own population who are being asked to decide whether their reaction to Israeli bombs is rage at Hizbollah or Israel.

So how do we react?

Interestingly, it seems that we tried to, at least in Iraq.

Marc Lynch, blogging at Abu Aardvark, has a post reviewing a new U.S. Army monograph on “Information Operations in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom — What Went Wrong?”

The root paper is interesting (and deserves a post of it’s own), but I want to focus on one of Marc’s conclusions (the second conclusion is also important, and I even agree – if we were funding the blossoming of news outlets in Iraq and then using it as a metric of success there are some possible serious problems there…):

First, if you recall the Lincoln Group fiasco, the problem there wasn’t that “good news” articles were being placed in the Iraqi press, or even that they were paying for play – it was that the origin of those articles was concealed to make it look like they came from Iraqis rather than from Americans. That’s a big no no. If the PSYOPS newspapers, radio and television stations were not clearly identified as American military outlets, and were presented as genuine Iraqi outlets, then it would be the Lincoln Group fiasco on a much larger scale… and carried out by the military itself and not by an amateurish, unqualified contractor. That’s a big “if”, and it is not clear from the report.

I’d wonder why, exactly, it’s such a big ‘no-no’, and welcome comments from Marc or others on that. My recollection is that it was a big ‘no-no’ because folks who were opposed to the war seized on it as evidence of American duplicity. I’m not sure how different the outcome would have been if the news had gone out under American bylines; they claim of duplicity would have simply been moved from the source to the content.

So on one hand, we’re getting rolled in the media by the oter side, and on the other, we seem to be precluded from managing newsflow because when we’re caught, it will be so embarassing that we’ll lose all credibility.

A challenging conundrum.

Why is it so challenging?

Well, I’ll go back to my earlier writing about the role of media and the citizenship obligations of journalists.

On one hand, their role is to see things and share them.

On the other, they are members of a polity who – to some extent – share the interests and goals of the polity.

As I’ve discussed, it’s not so clear that goal #1 – the search for the great image, soundbite, or lede – hasn’t completely eclipsed goal #2.

Edward R. Murrow seemed to do a pretty good job at seeing things and telling stories about them. He also didn’t seem to have a lot of trouble remembering which side he was on.

How do you think he’d have reacted when Hizbollah tried to stage-manage the news in front of him?

Why is it that so far, only one mainstream journalist has stood up on the issue? Maybe I’m undercounting – and God, I’d love to be wrong on this.

But if we allow the media to be managed against us – and here I’m not suggesting that the media are traitors, just that their perception of their job – as Mike Wallace put it – wasn’t to say “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”.

Here’s a guest post from uber-commenter Daniel Markham. It’s cross posted on his blog What To Fix

I’ve been doing analysis for most of my life, and I’m curious about the current state of world affairs, so I thought I would share with you my preliminary conclusions on the world situation as it is today.

I believe we are fighting the First Media War. I believe this war started sometime in the 1980s, and will continue for at least the next fifty years. Just like the American Civil War ended in the trench warfare that we saw again 50 years later in World War I, the Cold War ended with Vietnam with the Media War tactics we saw 20 years later in Middle East. In some sense, it may continue on forever, for this war will either evolve backwards and become explosively deadly or evolve forward into traditional multi-party politics.

This is an involved thesis, with a lot of information, so if you are looking for the cartoon-of-the-week, it ain’t here.All conflict has consisted of two things: messages and options. When we were cavemen and some other tribe raided our tribe for food and women, they were sending us a message about their strength, our weakness, their plethora of options, and our paucity of options. Indeed, killing an opponent has always been as much about exercising one of your options and sending a message to those that remain living than it has been about anything else. Over time, as we became more and more civilized, we have forgotten this. The relatively recent rise of nation-states has de-personalized these concepts for those of us in the west. We have civilized warfare to the point that we have forgotten what it means when it is personal.

First some definitions.

Messages – the information you are sending to the world. This includes your own population, and the population support base of the enemy. In the caveman example, seeing your opponent advancing towards you with a spear is an urgent message that your brain insists on your processing immediately. Civilized people believe that he rise of nations meant that only nations made and received messages. This is no longer a productive paradigm. Ideologies make and receive messages. People claim to send or receive them for an ideology.

Messages have two purposes. The first is marketing, or telling people things they did not know before. Marketing is based on spreading information to the point that there is a desire to hear more information. That’s it.

Sales is another person taking action based on the information they receive. When we talk about the Iraqi occupation, for instance, some commentators say that we need to convince the average Iraqi who is sitting on the fence which way to jump. That’s patently not true. We need only tell them about their options. No action — the inability to decide — is a victory for the civilized world. Most of us sit around unable to decide things all the time. It is a peaceful way to live. We have a marketing job in Iraq. The side wishing people to take up arms has a sales job. Sales jobs are much tougher. That’s not making a comment on how good or bad things are going in Iraq, just an observation on the difference between the message types.

Options – are your ability to take various initiatives, both diplomatic and military (or a combination) without perceived encumbrance. Options are a direct result of property ownership and social complexities. When I had an arrow, my option was simply to shoot you or not shoot you. If I have a million-man army with a deep sea navy and millions of rich, independent actors ready to take loosely coordinated independent action, I have a lot of options.

Note that treaties by nature limit options. So do cultural norms, unspoken assumptions, and tradition.

Increasing your perceived options decreases your opponent’s certainty about their position. Opponents with few options feel insecure and are more willing to come to terms. (a phrase which may have little meaning in the future) While decreasing your opponent’s perceived options has the effect of hindering their message and hampering their morale.

Actions – are coordinated groups of messages and changes in perceived options.

Campaign/War – The goal of any campaign/war is to increase the number of positive messages and options you have while eliminating the ability of your opponent’s messages to create sales and your opponent’s options to create uncertainty

Looking at war as a set of messages and options is a generalization of warfare over the last several millennia. During the age of nation-states and industrialization, it was understood that formal armies were the only entities that fought to negotiate disputes, but this is a very recent assumption, and does not hold true in much of the world. Armies are hierarchical organizations, pyramids. The message is to tell the enemy’s state to stop fighting. One message, one organization. Conflict was either armed or not. Armed conflict meant that the options were all based on military warfare.

This pyramid, industrial methodology is the most effective in fighting other pyramid organizations, such as North Korea. In fact, in a trans-national,post-national world, loosely networked but strongly opinionated people are the new players. Against these ideological, networked and distributed opponents, such as Iran, the hierarchical army is the wrong tool for the job. Old definitions cannot work effectively in a new environment.

Note that what I am talking about is something the west is extremely good at: the coordination of messages and options in such a way as to prove that your idea is better than another. It’s called branding and marketing warfare, and when combined with diplomacy and military action is unstoppable. Unfortunately, nobody (and I mean nobody) in government has any idea what an effective marketing campaign looks like in the third world or how to combine these three concepts into an effective Media War. As we’ve seen in the states, the Department Of State and the Department of Defense are pitiful at even communicating at times, much less coordinating complex actions. Some progress has been made here, but both institutions have flawed mission statements and reasons for existence.

I’m not going to expound on this a lot more — there is a book’s worth of material here for writing. I will, however, point out some interesting conclusions that can be drawn from these definitions.

When talking about messages, the goal is to separate sales from marketing. We are currently using active metrics to determine message effectiveness, such as the number of phone calls in Iraq that turn in insurgents or the number of people killed by either side in the current conflict between Israel and Lebanon. This is like measuring the success of a picnic by going through the trash can afterwards. It’s countable, but it has no bearing on the changing conditions. Bean counters must count beans, sure. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. But you cannot measure what you do not define. If definitions are lacking, metrics are counter-productive.

Battles may be won without the sender or the receiver of the message being aware of it. In fact, the sender or receiver may be even unaware that a message exists. That’s because messages (and options) are about perception, not reality. If the Lebanese Prime Minister gets on TV and talks about how there was a massacre in Lebanon today because 20 people died, and the world perceives this to be true, it was a massacre. The message was sent and received.

Options can either increase or decrease perceived future options. Invading Iraq decreases future options if we believe we must be there until the place looks like Switzerland. It increases our options if we look at the pressure put on Iran and Syria and move towards having more ability to do unexpected things to these countries. Perception here, just like the previous example, is more important than reality. If US forces are perceived to be “tied up” in Iraq, then that sends a message. Likewise, Israel moving back into Gaza and Lebanon sent a message: we are going to act to defend ourselves even if we are unpopular. Bad message, but look at the number of options now available to Israel. They can distract the world in Lebanon while snatching up the Speaker Of Parliament in Gaza. In fact, the real problem with Israel currently is that they have such a bad message and too many options. It makes other countries uncomfortable. Especially the ones that want to exterminate Israel.

Messages are fought as stories, in MSM, blogs, and word-of-mouth. Messages fit into narratives, which are preconceived ideas of how the world operates. Controlling the narrative is the equivalent of controlling the high ground. The narrative will shape all future messages to fit into it.

Our industrial culture and structures are not suited to the new war. A lot of platoon commanders can organize a defense based on a piece of land, but none of them can organize a message/option campaign based on a Hezbollah/insurgent situation in an urban situation. Reading the situation is NOT like reading a topo map. To combat this a lot of times we say something pithy like “Get out into the people and listen” But getting out into the population is also not effective, because everyone has a different interpretation of the same interview. You’re also guessing at the sales effectiveness of your opponent, based on a regurgitation of his message. In other words, if I repeat your opponent’s narrative to you, that doesn’t mean I’m “sold” — that I have made a decision to take action. Maybe I just want to see your reaction. Maybe I tell you whatever I think will confuse you the most. You have to decouple your opponent’s narrative from the communication you are processing about your status. And you have to do it in a consistently repeatable fashion.

Governmental structures are supposed to operate certain processes for the citizens: water, electricity, sewage, conflict resolution, security, crime prevention. These processes provide perceived value — this is the “What’s in it for me?” or “Key Selling Point” of the marketing world. I have been studying organizational change for years and I can tell you that perception matters more than metrics when trying to change a complex system. The perception of the success of these processes, not the actual quantitative values, is the measurement of the campaign in an urban environment. Nobody cares if you have 20% more water than last year. Nobody cares if we have 400 calls into Baghdad this week. Those are wonk numbers. Those are facts, statistics, measurements. Without a message or a narrative, they are nothing for us. Maybe ammo for the enemy, but nothing for us.

The situation with our forces in Iraq is somewhat analogous to having a highly trained set of factory workers and managers, all world-class at making widgets. Only the widgets we were trained to make, nobody is buying those any more, and our management has no idea about how to develop a product and market and sell it. Our manufacturing, traditionally measurable activity is top-notch, but the perceived value of our product, the ability to match features of our product with needs of our customers, the perception of our brand in the marketplace — all key indicators of success, are not being measured or managed. We need to develop products within weeks or hours and have our factory workers crank them out with industrial efficiency. There is simply no room for multiple levels of command in such a fast-paced battlefield. The old McNamarra/statistical process control/industrial mindset was not-so-good even back in the 1960s. We need to give some folks a serious cranial-rectal decoupling.

Over the past few years, I have been developing statistical interviewing and measurement technology to answer the question of “how do we quantify all sorts of qualitative information about the way our company operates” for the civilian sector. I never really thought it had much application in the military world, until I started reading more and more about concepts like Fourth Generation Warfare and COIN operations. Now I’ve come to believe that we need to combine as many opinions as possible — this is a war of perceptions — adjust our output and cut our time to market to the bone if we are to win. Fighting a media war is not like anything we’ve ever done before, and our structure is against it, but we have the ability to win. We just have to adjust, adjust continuously, and adjust quickly. And by adjust, I mean, change the widgets, the message about the widgets, the narrative, and our options.

Daniel Markham is an Inventor and Organizational Change Architect for Bedford Technology Group. You can reach him by email here.

Tomorrow is Election Day, and we’ll be closely following both the Lamont/Liberman senatorial race in Connecticut and the McKinney/Johnson congressional race in Atlanta.

Our sympathies in both cases are probably pretty clear; first, and foremost we hope people will vote for Johnson – in fact we hope people will vote for him, and that you’ll go through your address book and email or call anyone you know in the 404 to see if they are in GA-4 and can vote – and ask them to vote for Hank.

In Connecticut, my feelings are more complex. As I’ve noted, I don’t much like Lieberman, but I think he’s right on some critical points – first and foremost that politicking around the war is a horrible thing to do – and something that may well lead to a bigger, nastier war later on.

And I think the Kos/”Blackface” Hamsher wing of activists are heading the Democratic Party toward wider electoral disaster. They may be able to concentrate national attention on one race and have a strong impact. We’ll see – my earlier prediction that Lieberman would lose the primary and then, if he chose, win in the general still stands. But I’ll say without qualification that a national party led by the Kossaks would be a train wreck.