{"id":12743,"date":"2007-09-01T15:26:25","date_gmt":"2007-09-01T19:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12743.html"},"modified":"2007-09-01T15:26:25","modified_gmt":"2007-09-01T19:26:25","slug":"a-masterful-con-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-masterful-con-job\/","title":{"rendered":"A masterful con job"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, the NYT<\/i> reported<\/a> that the White House “is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq.” It’s not because conditions in Iraq have improved, and it’s not because the president’s policy is producing results, but because the administration has “a sense the dynamic has changed.”<\/p>\n

It’s all about some amorphous “sense” that’s entirely independent of reality. Consider what we’ve learned this week. The GAO prepared a “strikingly negative<\/a>” assessment of conditions on the ground, with no political progress (the intended point of the “surge”) and little evidence of reduced violence. Of the 18 Iraqi benchmarks, Bush’s policy has come up short on 15<\/a>. An independent federal commission believes Iraq’s 26,000-member national police force is beyond repair<\/a> and might need to be disbanded altogether. A working draft of a secret document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad shows that the Maliki government is rotten to the core<\/a>. Iraqi civilian deaths are getting worse<\/a>, not better. The latest data shows U.S. troop fatalities worse every month this year<\/a> compared to the same months last year. A smidgeon of evidence pointing to at least marginal political progress late last week turned out to be smoke and mirrors<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s against this backdrop that the White House and its conservative allies boast, “See? This is the progress we’ve been waiting for.” More importantly, the conventional wisdom in DC is suddenly in agreement that they’re right.<\/p>\n

How on earth is this happening? Kevin Drum explains<\/a> that Gen. David Petraeus has run a methodical political campaign that has produced exactly the desired effect.
\n<\/p>\n

[Petraeus is] 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.<\/p>\n

And it’s worked…. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As con jobs go, this is a masterful one. We’ve been played.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, the NYT reported that the White House “is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq.” It’s not because conditions in Iraq have improved, and it’s not because the president’s policy is producing results, but because the administration has “a sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}