Perceptions Of Failure and The Pro-War Right

Yesterday in an article by Victor Davis Hanson titled, Honesty About Iraq, How Are We Doing? he makes the case that our failures are those of perception. We are just not spinning the war the right way.

The globalized media is an American epiphenomenon, but the narrative of the war is still the IED, not the purple finger. We apparently have no way of convincing the world that the primordial enemy commits daily something far worse than the sexual humiliation of the entire Abu Ghraib fiasco. Somehow “thousands have been killed” is never qualified as those mostly butchered and blown up by insurgents — since the loose use of the passive voice lends a general sense that somehow Americans are directly involved in, or responsible for, the killing.

This is the clarion call of the right when things do not go their way; it is the failure of the left and the leftist mainstream media. When tactics fail, when leadership fails, when there is no plan to achieve the dreams of those who wanted the war, then it's a failure of perception.
The media proclaims "thousands have been killed" and the Hansons of the world say the media is blaming it on our troops. This is total nonsense. When we read that 300 bodies have been found around Baghdad we don't think our troops killed them but Iraqis fighting their civil war. When a car bomb kills hundreds we don't think our troops were committing suicide. Which "thousands" is Hanson referring to?

Then you get the argument of equivalencies; their atrocities are worse than our atrocities and everyone would know that except for the media's shading of the reporting.
There is no excuse for what our troops and officers did at Abu Ghraib and it doesn't matter what horrors are committed by terrorists. When we sink to their level of brutality and then use their actions as justification, then we have already lost.

We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche. We think their kidnapping, childish infomercials, gruesome tactics, and horrific websites are primordial and counterproductive; but they are more likely horrifically simple in inciting the most basic fears and self-preservation instincts of ordinary people. Precisely because decapitation belongs to a different century makes it more gruesome now, not less. Because the al Qaedists steal many of their talking points from the Western Left does not make them unimaginative as much as eerily familiar. And because we can daily predict the serial barbarity of the jihadists makes it not so much unimaginative as savagely inevitable.

Is he saying here that the reasons that the American people are fed up with the war is because the terrorists are winning us over with their use of the media? I would love for Mr. Hanson to give me just one al Qaeda talking point that they picked up from the "Western Left". I would like to hear just one al Qaeda talking point. I've never heard one.

The reason I want out of Iraq is not because of their barbarity or bombs or beheadings. It is not based upon anything they do, but based upon our inability to fix this problem that was caused by our incompetent management of that country after the hot war ended.

We can quibble and fight about tactics on the ground, manpower numbers, strategic postures toward Iran and Syria, the need to prod the Iraqis, but our problem is more existential. Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either.

In this paragraph above is the truth about the lies told by the right. Our vast cultural and media resources have already been used to explain what is at stake, in every sense. The media in the run up to this war and in the early occupation was a willing propaganda tool for the government. It accepted every lie, exaggeration and outright falsehood handed to it without question in a patriotic frenzy of 9/11 payback.

What is lacking is not more spin but a coherent plan for achieving a suitable outcome that would include an Iraq at least as stable as it was under Saddam. I would love to hear from someone on the right define what victory would be and what it would look like.

The right is now living in a fantasy world where spin and perception is to blame for the incompetency of the Bush Administration and their way to fix it is with more of a spin to the right.

The war in Iraq is lost and it is not a failure of perception but of planning and execution. It is not a failure that can be blamed on anyone but George Bush.

Jim Martin

Thanks to The Newshoggers for the link.