Yellow Dog

The AP just reported that 10 marines were killed and 11 wounded in a roadside bombing near Fallujah.

I wonder how long it will be before Bush's recently unveiled "Plan for Victory" in Iraq will be implemented? There's no time like the present (or 3 years after the war began).

Other signs that a "plan for victory" is way overdue:

The U.S.-led Iraq coalition is steadily eroding, with two more countries set to pull out 2500 troops at the end of the year.

The Pentagon is under pressure to explain paid-for stories planted in the Iraq media--just call it "Propaganda for Victory (or the illusion of victory)."

You know what they say about the "best laid plans...."

Iraq Full Coverage on Yahoo! News

Today Bush dumped out a new strategy (same as the old strategery: we have no strategy) for "Victory in Iraq."

Coinciding with a morning speech by Bush, a bullet-riddled, 38-page pdf file was posted on the White House website. A quick look makes it painfully clear there is no concern in the Bush administration about how the war is actually going (quagmire), only concern about how the public is increasingly, rightfully, fed up with it.

What's interesting about those darn pdf files is that sometimes author information gets left in the document's metadata properties. In this case, it turns out that the author was none other than "feaver_p," a.k.a., Peter D. Feaver, Duke University political science professor, and recent addition to the Bush's National Security Council team.




Now, this is no earth-shattering discovery, but Feaver's involvement explains why this so-called strategy seems to be lacking in any kind of actual plan for victory. Note the original document title: Our National Strategy for Supporting Iraq. Support, not victory. That makes sense. Feaver's expertise is in analyzing public opinion about war, not military strategy.

In a recent article entitled Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq, Feaver and his co-author Christopher Gelpi write:

"...the level of popular sensitivity to US military casualties depends critically on the context in which those losses occur. Our core argument is that the public's tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war in the first place, and beliefs about the war's likely success. Both attitudes are important, and the impact of each depends upon the other. However, we find that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the public's willingness to tolerate American military deaths in combat . . .

"The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

So, the goal with today's "Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is to create the right conditions for Americans to be more tolerant of military deaths. Lovely! If you were hoping for a change in course, forget it. Try to get used to 83 deaths per month like we had this November.

More of Feaver's articles can be read here. It's fascinating to see how his research is being used to create public relations damage control for Bush's failed policies.

Some titles:

Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler, and Peter D. Feaver. 2005. "Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments, Candidate Choice, and Casualty Tolerance."

Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler. 2004. "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq."

Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. 2004. Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force. (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

# posted by Stick Thrower @ 4:01 PM