Subjectivism Goes to War

Jumping off some of Hannah Arendt's observations about Vietnam, Dave Meyer has an excellent post about Iraq and war as a "signaling" strategy:

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning.  Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."

To add some further context and specificity, I point out in Heads in the Sand that the Bush administration wanted to simultaneously get more rigorous about cracking down on nuclear activities in unfriendly states and less scrupulous about U.S. compliance with the multilateral non-proliferation regime. Consequently, they wanted regime change in Iraq not just for its own sake, but also to "send a message" to would be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.

As Dave points out, however, among many other problems with using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home -- "Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message." This is especially true in the modern world where it's essentially impossible to segment your message. In the past, it might have been viable for an administration to communicate one message, in foreign language, via the foreign press, to foreigners while allowing for a more muddled national dialogue in the domestic press and vernacular. But those days are gone, and today message discipline requires totally discipline.

I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you're going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet

Comments

All very true, but the direction of mandatory dissent destruction did not only lead from the need to "send a message" overseas, and therefore to crack down on dissent here.

It also, critically, led in the other direction. Winning the 2002 midterm election was quite seriously a major motivation for the Iraq war, and the war as a tool of domestic politics has been the most important reason that the Republican party is still behind the thing: it has served that party's interests very well.

Posted by Marshall | April 30, 2008 11:58 AM

Another big problem with this signaling strategy as played out in the Iraq war: it was supposed to signal our strength.

Posted by Chris Darrouzet | April 30, 2008 12:00 PM

has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home

The idea that the war has "undermined" our "democratic norms" is asinine. There is nothing undemocratic about an administration having message discipline. What people like Matthew are crying about is that the don't like the message, not that the message is undemocratic. Sheesh.

If "message discipline" is undemocratic, then all the left-wingers who complain about one of the candidates using arguments "out of the Rove playbook" are anti-democratic.

Posted by Al | April 30, 2008 12:15 PM

...using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home -- "...there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message."

It all depends on what the actual goals of the group running the government are.

The Cheney / Bush use of war has been utterly incoherent -- as badly focused and unplanned as its response to Katrina. It reflects the desires and demands of neocons (proving a PoliSci 102 debate they had as Sophmores at the expense of Iraq, America, and the Middle East), oil companies (if countering Iran means control of Iraq's petroleum resources, Woo-Hoo! ), and "defense industry" contractors and profiteers.

In the van come politicians, and ideologues, but they're only capitalizing on the war: As long as it lasts, they have an excuse to exert undue influence on the population, and make a little extra cash -- demanding that we support the war, intimidating the media; swiftboating Democrats; and using an undeclared State Of Emergency to create a one-party state. This would be the Hasterts, and Delays, the Hagees and LaHayes, and Fat Karl.

With so many counties to be heard from, no wonder our foreign policy looks like a Camel, huh? Perhaps they should exhume Howard Creel?

Posted by Jemand von Niemand | April 30, 2008 12:15 PM

What are costs to any sane person (war, loss of life, injustice, torture, "collateral damage", militarizing society, propaganda at home) to them are benefits. The entire history of republican thinking (little r) from the classical antiquity to our own founders has been to warn us about the threat empire poses to our own freedom. But it's always year zero for American conservatives so none of that counts. It's as if our foreign policy was inspired by The Secret.

The whole campaign Obama has said that he looks forward to debating McCain on foreign policy. Let's hope that happens.

Posted by Chris M | April 30, 2008 12:17 PM

Ha. Message: we will invade and occupy you even if you don't have wmd and even if you let in inspectors.

But I've never understood the compulsion, as demonstrated by Arendt, to find a single cause for war. Every war has multiple causes. Iraq has the desire of Bush and friends to send a message, oil, the desire of neocons to practice "national greatness" and protect Israel, Rove's desire to distract the public from Enron and win the midterm election, Bush's oedipal issues, Cheney's fanaticism, the general bipartisan consensus in favor of Empire, etc...

it's all about confluence.

Posted by David Mizner | April 30, 2008 12:19 PM

@ Chris Darrouzet: Or, to borrow a Chris Bermanism: "But that's why they play the game."

Posted by Shine | April 30, 2008 12:20 PM

I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you're going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad.

It all depends on how broad the dissent is. If the war is deeply popular on the merits, and it is clear to the adversary that the dissenting group is small, and unable to affect policy in an significant way, then an effective message of resolve will be sent. If the war is not deeply popular, or if its popularity is clearly based on an unsustainable propaganda campaign that will be sniffed out eventually, then the adversary will reasonably conclude that public resolve will not be sustained.

This is not really a new phenomenon. It is a factor whenever a democracy fights a war - or for that matter whenever any government that is remotely responsive to public opinion fights a war. You're talking in part about the same point made by Arthur Vandenberg - "Politics must stop at the water's edge" - which Joe Lieberman likes to cite. But, in fact, politics rarely does stop at the water's edge, which is why it is a challenge for democracies to fight wars. And that's part of the rationale behind the "democratic peace theory" which Woodrow Wilson was one of the first to articulate.

For a democracy to effectively fight a long war, (i) the real reasons and likely costs of the war must be clearly communicated to the public in bullshit-free terms, and (ii) with that message effectively communicated, public support is still deep and committed.

However, democracies can fight short in-and-out wars based on massive bullshit and shallow commitment. A President can do a Granada just about any time he wants.

Posted by Dan Kervick | April 30, 2008 12:26 PM

America's bizarre and criminal wars always have an Oedipal taint. I can't imagine that, three years into WWII, there was a lot of discussion about why we were in the war in the first place.

Of course, it stands to reason that the vagueness of getting into this war would be reflected in the vagueness of getting out of it. Luckily, as the economy gets worse and worse, the idea that we are going to be in this war, spending Bushbillions for absolutely nothing, is cracking beyond the awareness level of the corrupt D.C. oligarchs and the media hollow men. Message control has gone haywire. I'm thinking, as we finish a month in which American troop deaths have made the inevitable ascent to September 2007 levels (the month when the press decided that the surge was "working") that the war will act as shorthand for all the incompetence and criminality of the governing class as we get closer to November. It is time for the Dems, though, to make that their message - ads connecting the run up in oil prices with the war, ads connecting the cost of the war to the 500 billion dollar deficit, ads showing every idiotic prophecy about deadenders made by the clownish Reps, ads comparing lengths of time the U.S. has been at war, even perhaps an ad now and then reminding the U.S. public that two thousand American soldiers have died defending the Da'wa led government, and 235 Marines died in Beirut in 1983 thanks to a bombing engineered by that same Dawa party. Bush - defending murders of American troops then, and murdering American troops now.

Posted by roger | April 30, 2008 12:31 PM

Al, as per usual, is grimly wrong.

From exposing Plame to get at Wilson to the whoring out of generals to the networks to having Bush lie during a State of the Union address or having Powell lie to the UN, there are striking anti-democratic aspects to the Bush strategy. Democracies don't work as designed when elected leaders lie and withhold information.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 30, 2008 12:31 PM

The "Ledeen Doctrin" really does put me in mind of the aphorism that a neo-Conservative is a liberal whose been mugged. The notion of deliberately picking fights with small countries every ten years just to demonstrate our strength really does seem characteristic of the psychology of someone who was once bullied who now, himself, desires to bully others.

Pop psychology aside, one of the major deficiencies of the Iraq war is that it was clearly and unambiguously sent a signal to our enemies that the power of the united states is, indeed, finite and that even a country as small and relatively insignificant as Iraq can soak up immense resources.

Every despot on the planet now understands that we're going to be very cautious about launching wars, in the future, simply because we can't bear the economic burden of too many conflicts. I fail to see how this has, on the whole, improved our security or significantly advanced our national interests.

Posted by Andrew Lias | April 30, 2008 12:37 PM

Speaking of Iraq and prominent journalists/pundits who helped construct the image of a just war -- when are you going to address the addition of that other Goldberg to the Atlantic's stable of bloggers? Your silence is of course commentary itself. Your name was also conspicuously absent in the unrepetant Jeffrey's debut post.

Come on, now's the time to bring back The Table -- a foreign policy debate between you and your new coworker with Sullivan as moderator. Maybe Spackerman can end the debate abruptly by tossing a blood red pie in the face of Goldberg.

Posted by Bragan | April 30, 2008 12:38 PM

The "Ledeen Doctrin" really does put me in mind of the aphorism that a neo-Conservative is a liberal whose been mugged. The notion of deliberately picking fights with small countries every ten years just to demonstrate our strength really does seem characteristic of the psychology of someone who was once bullied who now, himself, desires to bully others.

Pop psychology aside, one of the major deficiencies of the Iraq war is that it was clearly and unambiguously sent a signal to our enemies that the power of the united states is, indeed, finite and that even a country as small and relatively insignificant as Iraq can soak up immense resources.

Every despot on the planet now understands that we're going to be very cautious about launching wars, in the future, simply because we can't bear the economic burden of too many conflicts. I fail to see how this has, on the whole, improved our security or significantly advanced our national interests.

Posted by Andrew Lias | April 30, 2008 12:41 PM

Re Dan's citation of Lieberman: ""Politics must stop at the water's edge" - which Joe Lieberman likes to cite."
---------------
I guess that's why Joe Lieberman arranged for Ariel Sharon to send Bibi Nathanyahu over to address the US Senate and the American people in mid-2002. To tell us that we needed to take out Saddam before he used those nukes. Maybe Joe can tell us if Mossad has found Saddam's nukes yet.

I guess that why the largest financial donor to the Democratic Party in 2000-2002 was Israeli billionaire Haim Saban.

I guess that why Senator Joe Lieberman allows the interests of a small country on the far side of the world to dominate US MIddle Eastern policy --even when it costs 7000+ American lives.

I guess that why George Bush cited "British Intelligence" telling him that Saddam was getting uranium "from Africa". And why George had his little toy poodle Tony Blair come over and feed us a pack of lies ever so often.

And, of course, the really NEAT thing about the "Special Relationship" is that whatever restraints Congress and the Supreme Court apply to the White House re spying on US citizens do NOT apply to the Intelligence Services of the British Commonwealth.

If "politics stopped at the water's edge", this country would never have came into existence. Because the Founding Fathers could never have defeated the fucking Brits without the enormous help provided by France.

Posted by Don Williams | April 30, 2008 12:44 PM

roger's right. It's the last stand of the parochial American elite right now. Not only is nothing working, the best hopes for our establishment are the true sales reps for a vulgar American nothing--the McCains and Bushes--who are going to vegetate our way to freedom, with some unfortunate consequences for others.

I'm not so optimistic about the Dems getting it. The best-case of the passive fuck-up is a career saver. Small-scale social shunning or large-scale purging, there has been no way to pin down the power responsible for this, e.g. Hillary Clinton, the zoned-out media, the 'cynics' who duck and cry each time nothing goes right on their side. One maybe has to believe that it is a team effort, as someone said about the '62 Mets, it couldn't have been done on its own. I'd like to think the team doesn't include me, but I'm not so sure.

Posted by modulo myself | April 30, 2008 12:45 PM

Look, this is just "foreign policy as run by PR people", and it doesn't work very well.

We're also currently experiencing the effects of "national economic policy as run by PR people", which has lots of the same weaknesses.

And one of our biggest domestic problems is that many of our largest private corporations have gradually become run by PR people (plus accounting people), which doesn't work either.

The general problem is that while PR people are pretty good at lying and deceiving, they're not so good at organizing, producing, or innovating. And eventually the real world catches up with the problems their policies produce.

The sort of thing has happened in countless prior historical eras to countless corrupt and decaying royal courts, so it's really not that unusual.

Posted by RKU | April 30, 2008 12:49 PM

The overthrow was the message. It was delivered. Of course, the hash of the occupation mitigated the value of the message somewhat but the core message remains: we can conquer you if you get too far out of line.

Posted by brent | April 30, 2008 12:58 PM

The overthrow was the message. It was delivered. Of course, the hash of the occupation mitigated the value of the message somewhat but the core message remains: we can conquer you if you get too far out of line.

Posted by brent | April 30, 2008 12:59 PM

the core message remains: we can conquer you if you get too far out of line.

The occupation doesn't muddle the message. It destroys the message. "We" (the US) no longer have the resources to conquer anyway since we're tied down in Iraq. (this wasn't what the war advocates were thinking of when they talked about the "flypaper strategy", but the principle is the same)

Posted by Tyro | April 30, 2008 1:05 PM

Do you honestly think that if a genuine threat were to occur (not a "Iraq has WMD" pseudo-threat) that we don't have the resources to respond? Seriously. Really. How many Israeli jets did it take to knock out the Syrian nuclear facility a few months back? The message is as much about the will as the capacity.

Posted by Brent | April 30, 2008 1:13 PM

The idea that the war has "undermined" our "democratic norms" is asinine. There is nothing undemocratic about an administration having message discipline.

Al, there's nothing particularly horrible or unexpected about a political party having message discipline. (To some extent it is not my cup of tea, because I prefer intellectual honesty to everyone mouthing the party line, but I've lost that debate.)

You are conflating that with Matt's point, though, which is about the nation having message discipline, not a party. And in order to impose message discipline on the nation, you have to tell a bunch of public servants to lie to the public, you have to stomp out leaks and go after journalists, you have to use dishonest campaigns to discredit critics, you have to disseminate propaganda, etc.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 30, 2008 1:29 PM

Brent, I think Tyro was referring to our inability due to resource restrictions to follow the type of "permanent solution" that we followed in Iraq: overthrow and regime change. You need boots on the ground for that, which we lack.

"The occupation doesn't muddle the message. It destroys the message. "We" (the US) no longer have the resources to conquer anyway since we're tied down in Iraq. (this wasn't what the war advocates were thinking of when they talked about the "flypaper strategy", but the principle is the same)

Posted by Tyro | April 30, 2008 1:05 PM"

Very true. Say Iran was definitely pursuing nukes. We could bomb their facilities, but they would likely be buried so deep that we would need to use small-yield nukes to do so. Dropping a nuke, even a small yield one, on an Islamic country would be the end of American hegemony. Faster than you could say "blowback," the umma would forget about the Sunni-Shia split (and maybe even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and focus all of their attention on us. None of our allies save Israel would back us and Russia and China would view us as a rogue state. It would be roughly 1 billion vs. 300 million, leading to a death of a thousand cuts.

Even if they weren't buried that deep that a conventional bomb, a daisy cutter, or whatever would work, those would only be temporary measures. The nuclear program would go from being controversial in Iran to public priority #1 as we would lose any goodwill among the anti-mullah populace that we now have. As Zulfiqar al-Bhutto said about the Pakistani nuclear program, Pakistanis would be willing to live on only grass if it meant that Pakistan would have a nuke to counter India's nuke. The fact that a state run by incompetents like North Korea can make a nuke just shows how when an entire populace turns all of their efforts toward achieving a technological goal, they can make it happen, even in the face of starvation.

Posted by Reality Man | April 30, 2008 1:37 PM

This is decent, but only the beginning of the real problems with 'signaling' strategies. From a realpolitick analysis, these strategies are always bluffs. We can't do to the rest of the world what we did to Iraq. Not all at once, and not even one at a time.

Human beings consistently refuse to obey signals with any consistency even when backed by credible threats, much less our incoherency. Intimidation repeatedly fails in the long run. In short, this never works.

Posted by glasnost | April 30, 2008 2:07 PM

One of the presuppositions of the rationality at the base of democracy is that, on the whole, a population would rather be told the truth. In other words, that the population is adult.

I think that has frayed. Every time another tired revelation comes down that the Bush administration has lied, their supporters actually support the act of lying. They, in effect, are saying we support being lied to. This is truly a sociological phenomenon - somehow, a large part of the American public (30 percent at least) has developed what can only be called a syndrome of servility. This isn't fascism or messianism - it is something new. I think it is a sort of prolonged infantilism. Usually, these guys begging to be lied to, and happy to have swapped around lies for the past five years about the war, are bubble babies - they work in bubble industries, live in gated bubble communities, go to bubble churches in which a bubble Jesus promises that in heaven, they will still do the same thing. This has caused an atrophy of their ability to think independently - they are actually afraid to. Hence, the desire for torturing enemies, their anger not at being lied to, but that we discover that we are being lied to, and their production of meta-fairy tales - the fairy tale that climate change is not happening, the fairy tale that we are winning, the fairy tale of the liberal media, the fairy tale that tax cuts have lead to a business boom.

It is not their opinions that need to be challenged, but their life styles. Luckily, nature has a way of taking care of organisms that insist on ignoring signals from the environment. It sweeps them away. And as we adjust to the moron tax - the constantly higher food and oil prices, the stagnating or lowering wages - their bubble communities will fall apart.

It is harsh, but necessary. Spinelessness, brainlessness and road rage (or its equivalent - a mass petulance), all put in one package, is a danger that every classical writer on Republics has warned about, from Themistocles to Montesquieu. Now it is here.

Posted by roger | April 30, 2008 2:47 PM

This is bullshit.

They didn't spend five seconds thinking about "sending a message".

This was about US hegemony, oil, Israel, maybe some other things, including personal failings on the part of the leaders.

Matt is just fucking clueless. All this "signal" crap is just rhetoric from assholes or triangulation from pundits who are trying to avoid explaining why this country is being run by organized crime. It's propaganda. It is NOT why Iraq was done.

Roger: There isn't anything "new" about this "servility". It's chimpanzee behavior. Watch any primate troop. It's ingrained in the majority of humans.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 30, 2008 4:26 PM

If "messaging" was the real purpose of the war, then all those crazed conservatives who accused critics of the war of "undermining the war effort" were right all along.

When the main goal of the war is to send a message, anything that muddies that message (like individuals exercising their democratic rights to protest its failings) makes the goals of the war harder to achieve.

Huh, who'd a thunk that there was something about which Cheney was truthful.

Posted by Rab | April 30, 2008 4:43 PM

Al is, as per usual, grimly correct. It's worth pointing out that actual dissent these days is represented by the minority who know that the only real lies here are the sort displayed in Jeffry Davis' post (30April12:31).

And then there's the school of analysis based purely on mind-reading, extrapolation from web gossip, and bizarre conspiracy theories. Everything is really simple for the simple-minded, but reality is at least as complicated as Mixner suggests.

Posted by Robert Powell | May 1, 2008 5:51 AM

It's worth pointing out that actual dissent these days is represented by the minority who know that the only real lies here are the sort displayed in Jeffry Davis' post (30April12:31).

Jeffry said: "Democracies don't work as designed when elected leaders lie and withhold information."

This is true.

Posted by Bengt Larsson | May 1, 2008 6:55 AM

The problem with message discipline is all the annoying little facts, which tend to interfere. This increases exponentially when the message is a lie.

Posted by Aatos | May 1, 2008 2:24 PM

Powell, the consummate liar here, weighs in.

Surely an irony.

Posted by Richad Steven Hack | May 2, 2008 12:18 AM

Stable democracies are designed to work with actual humans in leadership roles--people who sometimes lie and nearly always withhold information. The smart ones avoid such behavior because in a free society the truth inevitably comes out.

Calling people liars without showing a single shred of evidence to back up the charge is a sure way to destroy any credibility one might otherwise claim.

Posted by Robert Powell | May 2, 2008 3:26 AM

I do see some merit to the argument. Imagine the signal we would have sent had we limited military action to deposing the Taliban in Afghanistan & bringing in that Bin Laden guy (remember him??), then working with a truly international coalition to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan.

Our moral authority in the Middle East would have been enormous, and the voices of moderation across Islam would share in that influence.

Instead, we sent the signal that we are amoral, arrogant, incompetent idiots. Not really the same.

Posted by Brautigan | May 4, 2008 4:17 PM