The Green Zone Surges IO in the Rising Phase of the Ongoing Counterinsurgency
it leaked
Chris Christie won’t appear on the ballot in Maine for the Republican primary, because he needed 2,000 signatures and couldn’t get them. He didn’t come close; he stalled at 844 signatures. In a state with 1.4 million people and not quite 300,000 registered Republicans, Christie’s professional campaign operation couldn’t get a thousand people to write their names on a piece of paper for him.
Also, Chris Christie made a major appearance on the Sunday morning news shows, talking one-on-one with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation to share his vision of our national future. As Chris Christie’s influence in America declines to levels almost too low to measure, his influence in the Washington, D.C. mediascape grows. He can always get on TV.
The other person who cast a big shadow over the Sunday shows, by the way….
The more America doesn’t want to elect you to any public office of any kind anywhere at any time for any reason, the more CBS News wants to interview you as a senior statesman. Expect Jane Pauley to sit down for an intimate one-on-one with Ebola, soon. “Talk to us about the way you cause diarrhea, Ebe,” she says warmly, nodding her encouragement.
An extremely important piece of reporting on Substack today puts this behavior into context:
The American Green Zone is running a counterinsurgency against America. We’re the occupied nation.
Counterinsurgency is an old craft, and it has a well-known list of basic principles. You don’t show up popular; you start with your small core of support, and you build outward. “The population's support is not spontaneous, it must be organized and it only comes from the minority that supports the counterinsurgent.” Of course the minority voices supporting the occupying force aren’t expressing the prevailing viewpoint, but the information operation requires that their talking points be disseminated, clearly and often, while insurgent messaging is degraded and attrited.
Over time, through the use of a combined set of tools that repress the insurgency and elevate the counterinsurgency’s message, the voice of the useful minority sinks in. The counterinsurgent force pursues “the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
As the US Army’s Information Operations field manual says, commanders use IO to “influence the attitudes and behaviors of relevant audiences…to affect the will, awareness, understanding, and capability of these audiences, while protecting our own.” You don’t tell people things that they believe — you tell them the things you want them to believe, intending to shape their attitudes and behaviors. You break the insurgency with repetitive, insistent messaging that degrades the will of the insurgents, while using force to subtract the voices that offer the wrong messages.
The degree to which American government and its media partners are treating Americans as insurgents, and subjecting them to counterinsurgency, will need to be explored in much greater depth over time. But the outlines of the effort are becoming clear.
Tragically, the effort requires us to sort of notice that Chris Christie exists.
Thinking about Alex Gutentag's piece at Public in the context of Laura Dodsworth's "State of Fear," about the UK government's deliberate manipulation of anxiety during the pandemic. How does all of this fit together, over time? What does the pandemic look like without the post-9/11 security state? The ratcheting effect of emergency after emergency after emergency....
They’ll be just as successful as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan because they know just as much about Americans as they do Arabs and Pashtuns. The managerial elite is only good at convincing themselves that they are taken seriously. No one else is buying what they’re selling. I’ve been writing for the past few days about how astroturfed liberal Substack is, accounts with multiple thousands of followers and hundreds of paid subscribers that barely break double digits in engagement. Their efforts only invite ridicule now, which is why they’ve turned to open hostility. That won’t work either. They don’t understand the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, or America very well, but the group they have the least awareness of is themselves.