A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “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.”

Army, iraq, show of force, brand, identity, RAND, report, military operations

Report: civilian and military death toll in Iraq is up strongly after US “surge.”

iraq, death toll, war

In yet another lesson about how a bad joke in front of one audience can trouble a larger public, MoveOn wants McCain to know bombing Iran is no laughing matter.

Music and bombing, it could be said, really only go well together when joined in criticism.

moveon, iraq, iran, bomb iran, barbara ann, bomb bomb bomb, mccain, john mccain, senator mccain, video, parody, stumble

Mentioned earlier, but worth mentioning again: TrueMajorityACTION’s Take It Back campaign. Among the videos and political graffiti of the moment, don’t miss Freedom, Beat Box Bush, and Hijacking Catastrophe.

And as funny as the Brazillion Joke is, we need a government that doesn’t lie, a government that’s smart, a government that cares for its people, its soldiers and foreign civilians and our elections.

bush, election, george bush, george w bush, iraq, midterm, midterms, politics, progressive issues, bush, election, iraq, katrina, midterm, war, take it back, true majority, vote, voting, w, war

found by lorelei in Copenhagen.

discovered by Kieran’sPhoto’s’ in Cork.

bush, election, george bush, george w bush, iraq, midterm, midterms, politics, vote, voting, w, war

Karen forwarded mgarthoff’s Freedom, tagged: bush war election midterm iraq katrina on YouTube.

Freedom, bush, election, freedom, george bush, george w bush, iraq, katrina, mgarthoff, midterm, midterms, politics, video, vote, voting, w, war

Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed column today was full of the kind of easy one-liners that repressives conservatives usually like to use against honest people progressives. I got it from my friend Joe, but because The New York Times thinks their content is golden, they won’t let me link you to the full-text. Eh, I looked it up in LexisNexis (also a paid service, but better (marginally)) and posted the good parts here:

The Downing Street memo — minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began — has proved as accurate as “Mission Accomplished” was fantasy. Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix “the intelligence and facts” around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to “faulty intelligence,” but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

[Former CIA agent] Drumheller says that until the White House “comes to grips with why it did this” and stops “propping up the original rationale” for the war, it “will never get out of Iraq.” He is right. But the White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost two years.

The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him.

1000 days, bush, dubya, failure, falsehoods, frank rich, george bush, george w, george w bush, iraq, iraq war, lies, op-ed, political expediencies, w, war, war crimes

Some time ago I pointed to John Robb’s discussion of the potential for the network to amplify the threat of violence from otherwise un-connected and un-organized individuals. Now Noah Shachtman at DefenseTech is writing about “open source insurgents.”

It used to be that a small group of ideological-driven guerilla leaders would spread information, tactics, training, and cash to their followers. No more. Internet-enabled insurgents with only the loosest of real-world connections can now share all of that freely online. These guys don’t have to like each other. They don’t have to agree with one another. They don’t even have to interact, really. All they have to do is post material to the Net.

Shachtman notes a Washington Post series on the matter (the final installment is a must read).

It’s worth noting that Shachtman also points to John Robb’s writings in this area and that he just returned from a stint in Iraq where he got to see some of this on the ground. What’s he got to say about it all?

In this way, the new Iraqi “non-insurgency” may be tougher to beat, ultimately, than the more ideological guerillas of the past. With such a diverse band sharing information so quickly, there’s no one “leader” or group of leaders to eliminate. In fact, taking out the most visible leaders might only make the Open Source network more efficient, by eliminating unnecessary nodes.

Scarily, we’re all starting to learn that Metcalfe’s Law and network effects apply to violence too. Shamefully, it seems everybody pretty much agrees with former British foreign secretary Robin Cook who noted “There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in.”

Photo: from leodecerca’s photostream at Flickr. Other Flickr finds: Eyes Wide Open exhibit, and camouflage.

tags: defensetech, guerillas, ideological, insurgents, iraq, john robb, metcalfe’s law, network effects, noah shachtman, open source, open source insurgency, open source violence, terrorism, terrorist, terrorists, world connections, world wide web