Update: see followup above…

The usual suspects are going bonkers – bonkers! – over the notion that the Pentagon briefed a cadre of retired military men who served as ‘expert commentators’ in the media.

So here’s my problem. If we’re engaged in counterinsurgency, public diplomacy and information warfare – which the insurgent side are very good at, spends a lot of time doing, and where the mainstream media only recently grudgingly backed away from the most egregious, falsified examples of their work – is a critical component, according to pretty much everyone who has written on the subject.But – our government can’t play. Not only are there legal restrictions, but the simple fact that information was given to commentators, bloggers, or reporters by the government – in the hopes that it can shape the information battlespace – is illegitimate, and is itself a major meta-story.

I don’t think it’s wrong to be concerned about the government shaping the news. I think it’s necessary to shape perception as a part of any successful counterinsurgency.

But those two principles seem to be in a midair collision, and as a consequence it’s going to keep raining aluminum.

Here’s a quote from Betz on the importance of information war:

Third, by contrast, we do not focus enough effort on winning and maintaining the hearts and minds of the most critical and accessible population: our own. Clearly, armed forces do not want to be concerned with the management of domestic perceptions of conflict; nor should that be their responsibility – although soldiers of all ranks must be ever aware of the impact on the virtual battlefield of everything they do on the real one. Indeed, in the United States there is a specific legal impediment to doing so in the form of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (establishing the USIA) which required that propaganda intended for foreign audiences ‘shall not be disseminated within the United States, its territories, or possessions.’5 Yet T.X. Hammes argues that the war we now face is one in which our opponent,

… uses all available networks – political, economic, social and military – to convince the enemy’s political decision-makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power.6

And if that is the case then we are ignoring the defence of a critical vulnerability. It is as though we had entered some gladiatorial combat with helmet visor closed, sword dull and bent, and shield lying in the dirt. The United States, in particular, it is argued, possesses a ‘quagmire mentality’ which gifts its enemies with a playbook for its defeat.7

…and one on the problem I cite above:

Thinking of Freedman’s second point, we can see that there are other disadvantages we face when it comes to creating compelling strategic narratives. In the West narratives which are deliberately constructed by Government are almost immediately rejected for that reason whatever their inherent accuracy or falsity. The public is highly sensitized to ‘spin’, the media excels at revealing (and counter-spinning) it, and no narrative can long survive the perception that it is based, even in part, on a lie. Narratives which reinforce already existing ideas, on the other hand, are easily portrayed as ‘populist’ demagoguery. Arguments which appeal to the reason are deemed more trustworthy than those which appeal to emotion and historical analogy, but, at the same time, generally people lack the patience for long argument. Basically, if you need to target your base and find that it is fractured and lacks purpose, lacks the attention span for in-depth appeal to argument but is exquisitely sensitive to manipulation and possesses an innate mastery of semiotics then you have a problem. And if, moreover, your opponent’s base is unified, has a sense of purpose, a rich oral tradition which lends itself well to story-listening (and telling) and is fairly credulous when it comes to conspiracy theories then you have got a very serious problem.

(emphasis added)

I’ll try and extend this and talk more about this conundrum. But for now, let’s set the problem out there and talk about it.

Kings of War posts a brilliant paper (pdf) by Professor David Betz on ‘The Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’. I’ll have a lot more to say about the paper next week (my initial reactions are that it obviously ties to Western self-abnegation, and that the issue of the relative attitudes toward violence – they video violence and see it as self-affirming, we video violence and see it as an immoral admission of failure), but you should for sure read it.

I brought a copy over here to download because I didn’t want to burn KoW’s bandwidth; if they (or anyone else) thinks that’s inappropriate, please speak up in comments.

In less-happy gun news, a young local man who was shot by a gang member (who shot two El Segundo police officers and then was shot and killed himself) was laid off from his job at a local travel agency – because he was absent from work recovering from his shooting.

Pinnacle Travel Services, of El Segundo couldn’t be reached by the Daily Breeze.

Now I travel a lot – too much – and one thing that I value in the companies that I deal with is flexibility; stuff happens and plans change, and the last thing I want to hear is “sorry you’ve been shot, but you’re only allowed so many days off without being fired….”

From the WSJ:

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.

(emphasis added)

(h/t Tyler Cowan, who you should be reading every day)

Somehow it seems appropriate to add a favorite Clint Smith quote as well:

“If you carry a gun, people call you paranoid. That’s ridiculous. If I have a gun, what in the hell do I have to be paranoid about?”

Here’s the IAEA’s briefing (pdf, very interesting) on the Iranian ‘nuclear laptop’ (h/t Laura Rozen).

Talk amongst yourselves…

From Politico –

The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.

Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions – a mix of fair and impertinent – he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.

Just because I can’t help myself, some more reading on the growing “concern troll” movement in the Democratic Party.

From Matt Bai, in the New York Times:

In the summer of 2005, Mark Warner, then Virginia’s governor and a likely candidate for president, was the honored guest at a meeting of liberal donors just north of San Francisco – the same kind of crowd to whom Barack Obama was talking last week when he made his comments about bitterness, guns and religion. On that night, Mr. Warner proudly rose to make his case for why his success in Virginia could translate into Democratic success in other rural states, and to explain how he had improved schools and local economies in the state’s forgotten mining towns. But to his frustration, the donors were far more concerned about his stands on social issues – why he had capitulated to rural voters by embracing gun rights and parental notifications for abortions. At the end of the evening, as one of the donors pushed him further on abortion, Mr. Warner finally lost his cool. “This is why America hates Democrats,” he blurted before he drove away.

From George Packer, in the New Yorker:

The real problem with what Obama said is that it’s basically untrue. In southwestern Pennsylvania, religion, hunting, and insularity predate the post-industrial era. They’ve have become politically manipulable points in part because of economic decline, but to confuse wedge issues with traditional values is the mark of the high-minded reformer or the political junkie, or both. It’s the kind of mistake one could make only from a great distance, once those voters had become almost entirely abstract – and, again, no one wants to be an abstraction.
…
But Obama’s devotees, who have an unattractively worshipful tendency to blame his mistakes on everyone but him, would do their candidate and the Democratic Party a favor by acknowledging the damage he’s done to both. It wasn’t accidental. Obama betrayed his own and his Party’s essential weakness, and in the process handed the opposition a great gift. He won’t be able to turn this weakness into the kind of strength that ends eras and wins elections until he understands what happened over the past few days.

From new-to-me but darn interesting blogger Tom Watson:

And some of that thinking manifests itself in shouts of “real Democrat” and the like. But in my view, suggesting that only Barack Obama and his backers are the “real Democrats,” and that the party would best be served by the leave-taking of Clinton and her base, is so much whistling past the graveyard. If she does, you become a third party overnight. If the electoral map shows you anything, it shows in hues of blues and red and purple the continued need for a Democratic coalition based on economic common cause.

But hey, they’re all just concern trolls and can comfortably be ignored – right, boys?

…but if you’re going to snark over my criticism of the lame-o Voice piece, could you at least snark about what I actually wrote?

Here’s Scott, one of the Wiley Coyote super-geniuses at ‘Lawyers, Guns & Money‘:

What the Democrats really need, apparently, is to enthusiastically support a decision to waste hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars replacing a dictatorship that poses no significant security threat to the United States with an Islamist quasi-state allied with Iran. Now there’s electoral and policy gold!

Hang on, let’s go look through the post about the Voice, and then the one about Bittergate, and then the one about Hillary…hmmm…Iraq, nothing, war, nothing, Islam, nothing, Middle east – nothing.

Here’s what I did say, in the Bittergate post:

I think that the grandparents of these voters voted solidly Democratic because they remember that they got electricity from a Federal program, and paved roads from a Federal program, and home, business and farm loans guaranteed by Federal programs. They might not have been comfortable with elitist East Coast politicians, but they had some concrete sense of what they got for voting for them.

I’ve asked for a long time what, exactly the Democratic Party has done in the last 20 years for a typical 35-year-old single mother who works as an administrative assistant in a big city. The answer: not a hell of a lot. Not anything I can think of.

To that I’ll add the question of what the Democratic Party has done in the last 20 years for the 35-year-old son of a factory worker who manages to get temp manufacturing jobs, alongside his wife, and tries to support his three kids doing it. He’s getting by because his dad had a great retirement plan and equity in his house. To him, the government wants to close his hunting areas to protect spotted owls, let his 14 year old daughter get an abortion without his consent, and charge him more and more for the privilege.

Not so much about Iraq…

Here’s what I said in the Hillary post, citing Judis (one of those right-wing thinkers, you know – the co-author of ‘The Emerging Democratic Majority’):

If you look at the upcoming presidential election in this light, the Democratic prospects do not appear to be good. McCain is an acceptable Republican–a war hero and a reputed moderate. (His greatest inherent liability, which could make him unacceptable regardless of his ideas or background, is his age.) Both Democratic candidates, whatever their protestations, are seen as coming out of the party’s liberal wing on guns and abortion.

and then citing that known crypto-fascist, Bill Clinton:

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

And in the Voice post?

We’re in an election cycle where the GOP candidate should be staked out like a sacrificial goat waiting for the knife. Instead, we get Democratic thinkers worrying – appropriately – that the Democratic candidate is going to actually lose in November. And one of the big reasons is that the public voice of the Party is cranky, smug yuppies.

So Scot, my man – did you forget your glasses? Monitor too dirty from the outraged spittle? Help a blogger out…

And while Edroso and Tbogg think it’s kinda silly that they singlehandedly might be placing the election at risk – and I agree, the issue isn’t about them, personally, or the hundred and hundreds of people following the debate about his article – the attitude they express so perfectly is what’s at issue, and it is one that’s pervasive through the progblogs (in fact, I’d say having that attitude is necessary for playing there) and, sadly it’s spreading out into the real world.

In my spare time, I’m just going to keep doing my part in kicking it, both in the hopes that I can help push it back just a little to make room for a saner form of Democratic discourse – and, bluntly, because it’s just so much damn fun.

It’s amazing to me how unified the progblogs are in bashing ABC over the debate questions last night. It appears – remember, no TV in the house, so didn’t see it – that ABC did a pretty good job of asking the candidates the questions that the GOP will be asking the nominee.

That strikes me a good thing; given that the intention is to select a nominee who can win, I’d like to know who can stand up to the inside fastballs rather than just hit the hanging pitch over the center of the plate.

Who can bash Bush the loudest or hardest – or who has memorized the more exhaustive set of briefing papers – doesn’t tell us much about who the best candidate will be.

So while the bloggers are beside themselves that tough questions mean the media isn’t keeping it’s 15% tip going for the Democrats, in fact asking those questions was the most favorable thing the commentators could do.

Let me be absolutely clear on one thing; I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that Hillary will win the Democratic nomination. She had an opening; Obama made it for her. But she was completely incapable of moving through it – her own ineptitude and tone-deafness in responding (Crown Royal?) have made her response to Obama’s gaffe as damaging to her as it is to him.

Her obvious inauthenticity makes her a candidate who will never be able to succeed in the modern media world.I do think there’s a meaningful risk that Obama will lose – but I was wrong about ’06 (the Democrats picked up far more seats than I thought they would, albeit with Blue Dog candidates)…so let’s watch the debates and see how the week will turn out.

But the impact on the general is seen as significant to Democratic thinker John Judis:

If you look at the upcoming presidential election in this light, the Democratic prospects do not appear to be good. McCain is an acceptable Republican–a war hero and a reputed moderate. (His greatest inherent liability, which could make him unacceptable regardless of his ideas or background, is his age.) Both Democratic candidates, whatever their protestations, are seen as coming out of the party’s liberal wing on guns and abortion.

Read the whole thing…