If Only We'd Consulted Madison Avenue Sooner

According to yesterday’s Post, the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid Rand Corp. $400,000 to study the “brand failure” of the U.S. presence in Iraq. The study was titled “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation,” and its gist, as the Post sums it up, is that the “key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves ‘shaping’ both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light.”

The rest of the study is chock-full of helpful, cutting-edge military-marketing research.

For instance:

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.” That is what President Bush's new Iraq strategy is striving for as it focuses on establishing a protective U.S. troop presence in Baghdad neighborhoods, training Iraq's security forces, and encouraging the central and local governments to take the lead in making things better.

Also:

In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. Cultural connections -- seeking out the local head man when entering a neighborhood, looking someone in the eye when offering a friendly wave -- are key.

Furthermore:

Wal-Mart's desired identity as a friendly shop where working-class customers can feel comfortable and find good value, for example, would be undercut if telephone operators and sales personnel had rude attitudes, or if the stores offered too much high-end merchandise. For the U.S. military and U.S. officials, understanding the target customer culture is equally critical.

Wait – this is a lot of information to process, so I want to make sure I’m receiving it correctly. This study is telling us that, when the U.S. occupies a foreign country, it would be more helpful to project a helpful image than a threatening one? And that killing civilians will make other civilians less likely to help our forces?

Jesus. I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.

If your blood pressure doubled while reading these excerpts, I don’t blame you. It’s truly infuriating to think that, as 20-year-olds are getting blown up daily in Iraq, this is the level of sophistication at which their superiors are operating.

Also posted at Campus Progress.

The Bush Years: The Relaunch

On April 26, 2007, I wrote:

"I'm in DC and will be posting sparsely for the next few days. Upon my return early next week, I will resume my heroic schedule of up to five posts per week."

This, uh, didn't happen. Since then I've taken a job as an associate editor at Campus Progress, and I blog regularly here. I haven't forgotten The Bush Years, however; it's time to get back on this crazy train. I'll be mirroring all my CP blog posts here and will probably be writing some TBY-exclusive posts as well. So stay tuned.

The Bush Years: The DC Days

I'm in DC and will be posting sparsely for the next few days. Upon my return early next week, I will resume my heroic schedule of up to five posts per week.

Where's The Outrage?

It came out last week, but everyone should read this McClatchy article. The news about our government, as usual, is bad:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Voter fraud is a very important issue for Republican Party's political masterminds. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't exist at anywhere near the scale that would elevate it to a crisis, so from time to time they have to fudge the numbers (subs. req.) a bit.

And yet there's still a dearth of real outrage. Sure, Bush's poll numbers are low, but that's passive -- a "when I have time to think about politics, it makes me mad" sort of outrage. Given what we now know about the Bush administration and what can no longer be caricatured as liberal madness (which is was for years and years) but has instead taken its place as fact -- everything from Iraq to Katrina to spying to the more recent U.S. attorneys scandal and the politicization of the GSA -- why does it still feel like most people don't fully understand the impact their leaders can have on them and the country?

Maliki Knocks Down Walls (Not Physically)

The AP is reporting that Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki's reaction to the planned wall around Adhamiya (or Azamiya; it appears there are two spellings) is, well, just like everyone else's:

"I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop," al-Maliki said during a joint news conference with the secretary-general of the Arab League. "There are other methods to protect neighborhoods, but I should point out that the goal was not to separate, but to protect."

He also noted that "this wall reminds us of other walls that we reject." Of course it does. It's the same concept.

Horrific Sectarian Violence And 12-Foot Walls: A Recipe For Peace?

The BBC and others are reporting that U.S. troops in Baghdad are in the process of building a wall around Adhamiya, a troublesome Sunni district:

Adhamiya lies on the mainly Shia Muslim east bank of the Tigris river and violence regularly flares between the enclave and nearby Shia areas.

Construction of the 5km (three-mile) concrete wall began on 10 April and the US military says it hopes to complete the project by the end of the month.

US troops, protected by heavily-armed vehicles, have been working at night to build the 3.6m (12 ft) wall.

When it is finished, people will enter and leave Adhamiya through a small number of checkpoints guarded by US and Iraqi forces.

Mustafa, a resident of Adhamiya, told the BBC, "I resent the barrier. It will make Adhamiya a big prison."

Mustafa obviously won't be the only unhappy one. The average Arab -- and this really must be a cultural thing, because I don't understand it at all -- doesn't like having to go through checkpoints run by an occuppying power to leave his or her neighborhood. People are so strange in that part of the world.

The article also notes that "[t]he US military says the barrier is the centrepiece of its strategy to end sectarian violence in the area but insists there are no plans to divide up the whole city into gated communities."

My question is this: Where to go from here? Because the plan, if I'm reading it right, goes as follows:

1. Build walls to separate two ethnic groups that are slaughtering one another.
2. ???
3. The warring ethnic groups war no more.

Number 3 would be a lovely conclusion to the war and also rhymes nicely, so I've been wracking my brain in an attempt to fill in the middle step. Unfortunately, I'm coming up completely empty. Any ideas?

Hopefully the tacticians in the Pentagon and Baghdad are smarter than I.

Yeah, The Kid Who Graduated College At 19 Has Maturity Issues

From a Boston Globe piece on Amobi Okoye, a recent graduate of the University of Louisville who next Sunday will become the youngest person ever selected in the NFL draft:

Okoye skipped two grades in school, started high school as a 12-year-old, and arrived on the Louisville campus at 16. He graduated with a degree in psychology in 3 1/2 years. As a 19-year-old senior last season, Okoye was second on the Cardinals in sacks (8) and tackles for loss (15), and fourth in tackles (55). Louisville defensive coordinator Mike Cassity said Okoye took the leap his senior season from solid player to impact player. It's that potential for growth that has NFL scouts drooling.

But oh no, there's a catch!

Okoye is still growing, on and off the field. Scouts project he could be as tall as 6-4, and while he played at 295 pounds last season, he was 312 as a junior and 305 as a sophomore. The biggest question about Okoye is maturity. Red flags were raised earlier this week when Pro Football Weekly reported Okoye was one of three players who admitted in one-on-one interviews at the combine that they had used marijuana. The others were Georgia Tech wide receiver Calvin Johnson and Clemson defensive end Gaines Adams. The interviews are supposed to be confidential and for the eyes of NFL teams only.

How many more years of this sort of idiocy do we have to endure? And do we really need our sportswriters helping to propagate it? I understand that Christopher L. Gasper (the author) wants to cover his bases, but Okoye's admission is about as relevant to the question of his maturity as would be the discovery that he sometimes fought with siblings when he was 12.

(ESPN.com recently ran an AP story on Okoye that is also worth reading, even if you're not interested in football. He seems like a remarkable kid.)