It’s been three weeks since the advance team of Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon published their narrative-shifting op-ed in the New York Times, which prepared the ground for the budding American hero David Petraeus to lead us wisely out of Iraq (first as general, then—say, eight years down the road—as president?).

Perhaps I give PRopaganda ^TM czars too much credit, but someone is doing great work building his image, which the New York Sun notes in passing:

The general, who oversaw the drafting of the Army’s first counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War, will also be running his own press strategy in Washington as opposed to delegating this task to either the White House or the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, Petraeus himself has got the gift of spin:

“You have to pinch yourself a little to make sure that is real because that is a very significant development in this kind of operation in counterinsurgency,” General Petraeus told the Associated Press. “It’s all about the local people. When all of a sudden the local people are on the side of the new Iraq instead of on the side of the insurgents or even Al Qaeda, that’s a very significant change.”

I don’t know what to believe about Iraq except that it’s a mess that we’ll be engaged in until we can find a graceful way out—that is, something we can frame as a win. Indeed, it’s vital that we win the propaganda war against players from al Qaeda to Iran to Hezbollah. I believe the information-war component of the conflict we’re engaged in is the most important component—and potentially, in the long term, the most effective. It’s the PRopaganda ^TM—the consumer-model selling—I can’t stand.

We are at least halfway up—or is it halfway down?—”bullshit mountain,” as Norman Mailer called it the other day:

“… [B]ullshit mountain has grown again. We are a country that lives under the oppression of bullshit mountain, and none of our politicians have the power of grace, wit, or the simple lack of self-preservation to attack it.”

Indeed.

President Bush addresses the nation from aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1 [2003] with the banner in the background.

A little while back, NYT film critic Manohla Dargis, writing about her earliest passions, explained (without intending to) why most of us are not addicted to, say, PBS’s NewsHour and NPR but rather to, say, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Countdown with Keith Olbermann—that is to say: we’re drawn to infotainment rather than “the news.”

It has to do with the human need to let our imaginations roam free with the aid of storytelling:

… Comic-Con [is] where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world. This is where you let your freak flag fly without getting beaten up by the playground bullies. …

I never became a comic book geek; then, as now, I got my fix from watching movies. [e.a.]

Whatever form of narrative we’re addicted to, we all need our fixes. We are all suckers for a good story. Marketers of all stripes, marketers of everything—from Viagra to the iPhone to the Iraq war to the Bourne Ultimatum to jihad to celebrity gossip—take advantage of our love of spectacle and our desire to suspend disbelief and our need to abandon ourselves to the pleasure and pain of feeling for someone else so that we will be alleviated, if for just a little while, of the burden of being ourselves.

When it comes to TV, the news as a narrative form just doesn’t do it for people; sensational storytelling—infotainment—does.

Last night, I linked to a Pew report released on May 25 which concluded that while the media’s number-one issue in the first quarter of this year was “Iraq,” the focus of most of the “Iraq” reports was the debate about the war— which took place here in the good old U.S. and A. I noted Americans’ narcissism, and suggested that the media simply feeds it: goes along to get along.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project that has just released a report about news coverage in the second quarter of this year, who is quoted in today’s NYT, appears to back up that finding.

“It’s a lot easier to cover [the war] as a political debate in Washington than to cover it on the ground in Iraq,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, which is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington.

While the amount of coverage of Iraq-related events declined in the second quarter in favor of campaign coverage (there lots of conflict there for all you infotainment fans), so-called “Iraq-related events” were still mostly about Americans.

The report notes:

Another finding in the first quarter was how much the war coverage focused on Americans rather than on Iraqis. Fully half of the coverage about events inside Iraq was about American combat and casualties as opposed to Iraqi casualties, Iraqi internal affairs, reconstruction efforts or other matters.

In the second quarter, the picture looks similar. News from inside Iraq became even more U.S. focused. Fully 55% of coverage about events on the ground dealt with U.S. combat and casualties, U.S. troop activities and soldiers charged with crimes. [e.a.]

So there’s no need to wonder why we don’t know more about how Iraqis feel about secularism or about nationalism (vs. the more popular narrative notion of endless sectarian conflict/civil war). The answer is simple: even when the media is reporting “about Iraq,” the reporting is all about us.

I daresay I was prescient about Americans’ focus exclusively on themselves even during the run-up to the Iraq war; see this post about my April 2003 conversation with the actor Ron Silver. I wrote:

I like to think that perhaps I had something to add to his understanding when I floated my insight—that American anti-war sentiment was not about Iraq. Anti-war sentiment as expressed primarily by our cohort was primarily a culture war issue: for them, it was about their own self-image. They were afraid that expressing war-like sentiments would make them look bad. (To whom? I wonder). They were American narcissists, self-involved, and most of them couldn’t give a shit about Iraq, about which they knew nothing (ignoring the fact that in our globalized world, the status of Iraq, among other Middle Eastern nations, is about America). They cared what their friends and peers thought about them. In America, it is always about peer pressure.

My thoughts and feelings haven’t changed about that. It’s more than a little disappointing, though, to see that, if anything, the narcissism is even more entrenched. Maybe that’s the best reason that America should never go to war: we are unprepared, in our own eyes, to be the bad guy.

Shadi Hamid says neoconservatism is dead.  I doubt it—and since I’m not an ideologue, I don’t care one way or the other—but I’ll play along, because apparently my only other option is to believe that there’s a Vast Neocon-Wing Conspiracy in the Foreign Policy Community of Very Serious People and that it is sending virginal, peace-loving Americans to war at the drop of a hat, because the United States is an imperialist menace.

Gawd.