Watching General Petraeus’s powerhouse testimony today (wasn’t Crocker a crock in contrast?), I could think of two reasons for doubting the rosy message he had for us.
First, he could have his facts wrong.
The general spared us PowerPoint (one of the military’s greatest sins) – but he did show plenty of fancy graphs. All demonstrated impressive declines in violence.
But Kevin Drum has argued, convincingly, that aggression in Iraq is highly seasonal. There are fewer deaths in the summer because it’s too hot to fight. And he’s got a fancy graph too.
The seasonality is pretty easy to see: violence peaks in spring, then declines during summer, peaks again in fall, and drops during winter… Taken as a whole the evidence pretty strongly suggests that the surge hasn’t had any effect at all on overall violence levels. It’s just moving in its usual seasonal pattern.
Bottom line: you should be skeptical of any claims about reductions in violence unless they take seasonality into account. So far, though, I haven’t seen any credible claims of reduced violence that even mention seasonality, let alone adjust for it. That should tell you something.
Let’s hope one of the committee members picks the General up on this.
Second, he could be deliberately sugar-coating.
That’s the problem with assessing 4th generation warfare – the military is fighting to dominate an information battle space, as much as it is to control a geographical one.
David Kilcullen, Petraeus’s counter-insurgency guru, has argued for the need to develop a new capacity for ‘strategic information warfare’:
Al-Qaida is highly skilled at exploiting multiple, diverse actions by individuals and groups, by framing them in a propaganda narrative to manipulate local and global audiences.
Al-Qaida maintains a network that collects information about the debate in the West and feeds this, along with an assessment of the effectiveness of al-Qaida’s propaganda, to its leaders. They use physical operations (bombings, insurgent activity, beheadings) as supporting material for an integrated “armed propaganda” campaign.
The “information” side of al-Qaida’s operation is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result.
Kilcullen calls for an “an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say and what we do to send strategic messages that support our overall policy”.
He is too canny to spell out the full implications of this (although he does, in another, longer paper, note the impact of ‘loss of political will’ on US ability to prevail in Vietnam).
But the inference is obvious. Ideas and narrative matter. And you need to win hearts and minds at home as much as you must do abroad.
In the modern media environment, ‘strategic messages that support our overall policy’ cannot neatly be separated into those for the home and foreign market.
If Petraeus believes he is now fighting an operation where “the ‘information’ side… is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result,” wouldn’t he be duty bound to put the very best gloss on the truth?
Whatever. A couple more Friedman units and we’ll know for sure…
