The implementation of COIN in Iraq has garnered success even as American\u00a0public diplomacy and IO efforts are justifiably trashed by…well…everyone, really. Why is that?<\/p>\n
Perhaps the reason has to do with the credibility of the actors operating on different levels of conflict. Unit commanders in Iraq, if they are engaged with locals and dependably follow through on their commitments and threats, they gain a degree of authenticity with their audience, friend and foe alike. More or less this is happening at the tactical level.<\/p>\n
Our national leaders, broadly speaking, carry no such weight on the strategic level, neither at home nor abroad. Regardless of their position on the war, most politicians appear to be disconnected economically and socially\u00a0from the lives of ordinary Americans, much less foreign audiences – unless they are foreign elites who were educated in American Ivy League schools. “Spin” has become so habitual and baldfaced lying, denial of reality and lawyerly semantics\u00a0so commonplace a tactic in American politics, that our words no longer carry any credibility, just our actions. When our actions then contradict our values as well, the game is over.<\/p>\n
Our elite cannot wage 4GW or strategic IO until\u00a0they first\u00a0become\u00a0connected enough to reality to systematically execute actions that build legitimacy in the eyes of\u00a0a multiplicity of audiences. Our checking account is overdrawn and we need to start making deposits.\u00a0This isn’t a call to appease anyone\u00a0but to earn the respect of even our enemies by making the certitude of what America is fighting for a given.<\/p>\n
After that, the rest is simply a discussion of means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The implementation of COIN in Iraq has garnered success even as American\u00a0public diplomacy and IO efforts are justifiably trashed by…well…everyone, really. Why is that? Perhaps the reason has to do with the credibility of the actors operating on different levels of conflict. Unit commanders in Iraq, if they are engaged with locals and dependably follow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[262,361,20,102,87,78,460,472,381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4gw","category-america","category-coin","category-diplomacy","category-foreign-policy","category-ideas","category-io","category-public-diplomacy","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}