As if looking to get mocked on blogs, the RAND Corporation has released a study which, according to the accompanying press release, “RECOMMENDS U.S. MILITARY ADOPT CONSUMER MARKETING STRATEGIES TO REACH IRAQI AND AFGHAN CIVILIANS.” My first thought was that we could start deploying brand loyalty cards like they have at CVS or the grocery store. By asking civilians in occupied countries to swipe their card each time US forces come to their assistance (in exchange for free MREs, maybe), we could learn more about the circumstances under which civilians feel threatened by insurgent attacks.

Alternatively, a colleague suggests we might let the Iraqis into the PXs, where they can redeem their bonus points from various transactions — checkpoint searches, midnight interrogations, etc. — thus softening the blow of humiliating foreign occupation. Soothing muzak could be used during operations. The jokes write themselves. Be that as it may, flipping randomly through the full document I hit upon a perfectly decent point, namely that we need to be more sensitive about how different messages play in different contexts.

One example was that this White House photo of Bush giving the “hook ‘em horns” salute to the Texas marching band seems endearing in the United States. In Norway, however, Bush was taken to be a Satanist. What’s more, people in Mediterranean and some Latin American countries “saw the President indicating that someone’s wife was unfaithful (that they were cuckolded and had ‘grown horns’).” As a more relevant example, to a Muslim, something that’s “jihad” is by definition a good thing, so when US officials refer to adversaries as “jihadists” we’re implicitly accepting their definition of the conflict as one pitting Muslim holy warriors against enemies of the faith. This doesn’t, it seems to me, actually have a particularly tight relationship to consumer marketing practices (James Fallows mentioned it in a brilliant September 2006 article without bringing up consumer marketing), but it is true that these lessons need to be learned.

White House photo by Paul Morse

New National Intelligence Estimate on the threat from al-Qaeda apparently says the threat is “persistent.”

• Spencer Ackerman notes that what we’re seeing declassified today is eerily silent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq’s impact on jihadism.
• Rand Beers’ National Security Network does some myth versus reality stuff.
• Kevin Drum deems it vacuous.
• Richard Clark says “It’s more about what it doesn’t say than what it does say.” In particular, it doesn’t say we have al-Qaeda on the run — because we don’t.

Anything else? My view is that these NIEs have started to suffer from a kind of Heisenberg Principle problem. They only constitute fodder for valid political point scoring if the authors aren’t expecting them to become political footballs. Since that’s clearly not the case with a report like this, it winds up having little probative value.

Anne Applebaum: “No troops? Though deeply appealing to the “we told you so” crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place? How many will take responsibility for the victims of genocide? I’m not saying there will be such a catastrophe, but there could be: Mass ethnic murders have certainly been carried out in Iraq before.”

This line of argument has been in vogue for some time now, but it seems singularly nonsensical. For one thing, I think there are real questions about the math — how many people arguing for withdrawal for Iraq really are advocates of large-scale insertion of US ground forces to Darfur? Not me! Numbers aside, I think it’s fairly obvious that if the US does withdraw from Iraq and full-scale ethnic cleansing does result (something Applebaum concedes is by no means certain) that very few withdrawal advocates are going to be clamoring for intervention. Here, I guess, is where the hypocrisy comes into play.

But it’s not actually hypocritical to favor interventions to prevent mass slaughter where you think such interventions will be effective, but not otherwise. The idea that consistency’s sake requires one to either be a pacificist or else to support whatever military adventure happens to be fashionable in the Washington Post opinion pages at the moment is daft.

His conclusion is odd, but today’s David Brooks column is pregnant with things to blog about. For example:

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

Now I suppose their must be some conservatives for him this “are supposed to distrust government” dictum applies, but for the past fifty or so years that’s clearly not the case. The mainstream conservative belief is that the government needs to be given dramatically greater scope to gather information and to deploy force — including deadly force — and threats thereof. This isn’t an innovation of the Torture and Arbitrary Detention administration, it’s a longstanding pattern. Conservatives didn’t like the Warren Court’s criminal justice jurisprudence, they didn’t like the Church Commission’s inquiries into the CIA, they chafe at contemporary military reticence about civilian casualties, etc.

There are exceptions to this (as there are exceptions to everything), but the dominant view in post-war American conservatism has been of almost boundless faith in violence and in large government institutions like the military, the prison system, etc.

Unlike the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China isn’t anything resembling a peer of the United States when it comes to nuclear weapons. Yes, the PRC has nukes. And, yes, the PRC even has nukes capable of hitting the United States. But it doesn’t have all that many, nor as they particularly sophisticated. What’s more, as Kier Lieber and Daryl Press note in the current Atlantic, the gap appears to be growing, “the United States is pursuing capabilities that are rendering MAD obsolete, and the resulting nuclear imbalance of power could dramatically exacerbate America’s rivalry with China.”

America’s “counterforce” capabilities — the ability to “win” a nuclear war — are much, much, much more advanced than China’s. This means China can’t be confident that it’s second-strike nuclear deterrent would prevent us from nuking China. But that means China may, in a tense standoffy moment, feel the need to be much more proactive with its own arsenal than you would expect in a MAD situation. If the Chinese believe an America first strike would result in victory, then launching a first strike looks like a good idea for the Chinese. And if Americans think a Chinese first strike makes sense from a Chinese perspective, but that an American first strike will result in victory, then a US first strike looks like a good idea for Americans. But if the Chinese knows that . . . and if the Americans know the Chinese know that . . . and the Chinese know the Americans know they know that . . . etc., etc., etc.

At any rate, it’s a fascinating — and disturbing — article. For more on this see Benjamin Schwarz’s column written where their academic study was completed, this post from Brad Plumer and this one one Robert Farley both from back in 2006, and Lieber and Press’ March ’06 article in Foreign Affairs.

National Archives photo of Operation Ivy via PINGNews.

I’m looking over some of the RNC’s oppo research, and I have to say it’s pretty unimpressive. Here John Edwards stands condemned for criticizing some business practices that he’s had some second-degree association with in his private sector life. Maybe it was through these activities that Edwards learned about the issues and became convinced of the need for public action. Robert Oppenheimer wasn’t a hypocrite for having worked on the Manhattan Project and being opposed to nuclear weapons.

This on Obama is, if anything, even worse. He stands accused of having views on forward-looking Iraq strategy that aren’t the same as his views in June 2006 and that are radically different from his views in September 2004. But everyone’s opinions have shifted over the years — the situation keeps changing; keeps, in fact, getting worse.