General Betray-us’s PR Gambit

From what I’ve been reading, I’m gathering the impression that Gen. Petraeus isn’t so much a “tool” of the Bush administration as he is a willing participant and, moreso, a master manipulator. Why, Petraeus even “cuddles abandoned Iraqi lambs!” Writes Washington Monthly‘s Kevin Drum (via Shirin):

GENERAL PETRAEUS’S PR BLITZKRIEG….I’ve been thinking about the whole David Petraeus issue for the past couple of days, and what I’ve been thinking about is how badly the liberal blogosphere and the liberal establishment have been outplayed here. While we’ve spent the last six months snarking about Friedman Units and complaining aimlessly about spineless Democrats, Petraeus has been slowly and methodically carrying out an extremely disciplined military campaign with a very precise goal: gaining support for David Petraeus and the surge.

In retrospect, this is hardly a surprise. Petraeus is a four-star general, by all accounts a brilliant man, and a professional student of counterinsurgency. He’s keenly aware of the value of both the media and public opinion, and he did what any counterinsurgency expert would have counseled in his circumstances: he unleashed a hearts-and-minds campaign aimed at opinion makers and politicians. For months the military transports to Baghdad have been stuffed with analysts and congress members, and every one of them has gotten a full court press of carefully planned and scripted presentations, tightly controlled visits to favored units, and assorted dollops of “classified” information designed to flatter his guests and substantiate his rosy assessments without the inconvenience of having to defend them in public.

And it’s worked. Even though there’s been no discernable political progress, minimal reconstruction progress, and apparently no genuine decrease in violence, he’s managed to convince an awful lot of people that the first doesn’t matter, the second is far more widespread than it really is, and the third is the opposite of reality.

 
First, a side note, lest it get ignored: Kevin Drum is spot on in his criticism of the blogosphere and liberal establishment for “snarking about Friedman Units and complaining aimlessly about spineless Democrats” while Petraeus has masterfully gained supporters and controlled the message.

So, every time we rant about the spineless Congress, we’re in reality abetting Bush’s and Petraeus’s game plan. We need to keep our eyes on the ball. And we need to empower, not denigrate, Congress, by encouraging them to step up the pressure to end the war, and also by praising them for what they are doing, including their significant passage of bills aimed at helping veterans.

Back to Drum’s analysis of Gen. Patreaus’s PR blitzkreig:

Next is a Washington Post article providing a glimpse of Petraeus’s meticulous and politically savvy planning:

The sheets of paper seemed to be everywhere the lawmakers went in the Green Zone, distributed to Iraqi officials, U.S. officials and uniformed military of no particular rank. So when Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) asked a soldier last weekend just what he was holding, the congressman was taken aback to find out.

In the soldier’s hand was a thumbnail biography, distributed before each of the congressmen’s meetings in Baghdad, which let meeting participants such as that soldier know where each of the lawmakers stands on the war. [See examples here.]

….Just who assembled them is not clear. E-mails to U.S. Central Command’s public affairs office in Baghdad this week went unanswered.

“I had never seen that in the past. That’s new,” said Porter, who was on his fourth trip to Iraq. “Now I want to see what they’re saying about me,” he added, when he learned of the contents of his travel companions’ rap sheets.

For one, the quotations appeared to be selected to divide the visitors into those who are with the war effort and those who are against.

Finally there was this tidbit offered up by Andrea Mitchell five months ago when the surge was just getting started:

MITCHELL: Petraeus went to the Republican caucus and told them, I will have real progress to you by August….The Republicans were against the surge but they felt it was fait accompli, and that they were willing to give Petraeus until August. He told them there will be real progress by August.

Five months ago Petraeus was guaranteeing to wavering Republicans that they’d see progress in August, precisely the month when the PR campaign was scheduled to go into high gear. Today he’s issuing dire warnings about al-Qaeda hegemony and nine-dollar gas if we leave, circulating bio pages that let his staff know whether they’re dealing with friend or foe among visiting congress members, and insisting repeatedly that violence is down in classified briefings where he doesn’t have to publicly defend his figures.

If these don’t sound like the actions of an honest broker to you, they don’t to me either. They sound like elements of a campaign with one overriding purpose: to convince politicians and opinion makers that we’re making progress in Iraq regardless of whether we are or not. We’re only seeing the results of Petraeus’s PR blitzkrieg now, but it’s obviously been in the works for months and it’s been a smashing success. The general has profoundly outplayed the amateurs on their home turf.

Bravo, general. Well played.

And those lambs? Laura Rozen featured a guest post at her blog, War & Piece:

I’m sorry, but Operation Petraeus Propaganda – reaches unexcelled heights with this article. It’s like a press release.

Coming tomorrow in the hard-hitting WaPo series leading up to the Petraeus briefing: “Petraeus cuddles abandoned Iraqi lambs!” The lede: “General David Petraeus, the man single-handedly responsible for turning the Iraq War around, likes to tell his troops about the importance of the “propaganda of the deed” in counterinsurgency operations. Always practicing what he preaches, over the last eight months, Petraeus has repeatedly put himself in mortal danger by descending on a town recently cleared and meeting locals without body armor or the other trappings of the elite commander. But Petraeus astonished even his own brain trust – composed of Rhodes scholar-warriors to a person – on Sunday when he publicly cuddled and fed a pair of baby lambs whose mother had been slaughtered in front of their eyes by al Qaeda only hours before. [New paragraph] Local residents were taken aback and immediately declared their devotion to the cause of bottom-up national reconciliation. “Before I thought of the Americans as my enemy,” said Ralph al-Peters, a resident of X, the town where the Petraeus cuddled the cuties. “But now I realize that the American Congress must not abandon us to the lamb-slaughterers. I hope they see that the enemy of our lambs is our enemy and that al Qaeda must be defeated so there is not another 9-11 nuclear holocaust made by the Iranians.”

It all reminds me of the film The Illusionist, not just the trickery, but the trickster’s ability to play on people’s need to believe:

Crown Prince Leopold: He has tricked you, it is all an illusion!
Chief Inspector Uhl: Perhaps there is truth in this illusion.

Chief Inspector Uhl wants to believe it is real. And that’s the trickster’s gift. Not just to trick people, but to create a yearning within people to believe. When I saw David Copperfield create falling snow on a Las Vegas stage, I wanted to believe it was real.

The professional trickster’s pride rests in his ability to fool people. As Shirin noted in her e-mail, “As a counterinsurgency expert, Petraeus is just great at self promotion. In fact, it is generally acknowledged among those who know him that his central focus is advancing his image and his career. He was described by one of his West Point colleagues as the kind of guy who would marry the commandant’s daughter in order to get ahead.”

How can we possibly counter such a powerful PR machine with such a clever fellow at its helm? We’ve been discussing how to get our message out in the threads immediately below, and it’s obvious we’re all frustrated as to how we can accomplish it.

One way we can counter this formidable PR onslaught is to STAY ON MESSAGE. We could adopt that “message discipline” for which Karl Rove is famous.

Yesterday, I caught part of a fascinating exchange on BookTV between Scott Ritter and Mark Crispin Miller. Miller was all about blaming the media and the media conglomerates for our inability to get our message out. Ritter was more about taking the American people to task for not paying attention, not speaking up, and not staying on message. Ritter used the example of Cindy Sheehan who, naturally, has a powerful message as the mother of a fallen soldier. Ritter noted that that powerful message broke through media barriers when she “sat in” near Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. She had, said Ritter, a great opportunity to keep her message alive. Instead, Ritter contends, she didn’t seize the moment and then in a short while, there she popped up in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez by her side, and then she and her pals occupied the office of Rep. John Conyers, alienating a man who is highly sympathetic to her original message.

Ritter says we need to be smart and savvy with how we use and state our message. If Cindy Sheehan had remained the mourning mother of a slain soldier, she’d have stayed far more effective. But by aligning herself with controversial side issues and by attacking those inclined to support her, she lost the frame and the media spotlight that had come so naturally to her.

We need FOCUS.

We need to not alienate those inclined to support us. We need to empower them through support. We must let them know we have their backs.

We need to not make the American public wary, or confused, by dragging every pet far-left cause into the Iraq war story. No more “Free Mumia.” No more Sean Penn types cozying up to Hugo Chavez. If those issues are important to you, great. But let’s not mix them in with the Iraq war message we want to get out.

The sole focus, I suggest, is on ending the war and bringing our trooops home (albeit responsibly and carefully).