welcome to bullshit mountain

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.