But al Qaeda's largest harvest from "random slaughter"
strategy was realized in America. Through acts of
indiscriminate violence transmitted by the media,
insurgents brought their war to America's living rooms.
The atrocity-of-the-day is the principal informational
input most Americans receive. This forms their knowledge
base. The public does not live in the villages and mahalas
of Iraq. Patterns of recovery, of normalcy, are not
evident.
This is the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. And al
Qaeda is clearly winning it. . . . Al Qaeda is running its
war on smoke and mirrors - or, more accurately, on bytes
of sound and sight. Congress could act on General
Petraeus' reports from the ground, rather than broadcasts
generated by insurgents. This requires a simple commitment
- one foreign to many in the elective branch: Leadership
How Al Qaeda is Winning Even as it is Losing Font Size:
By J.D. Johannes
TCS Daily
In Iraq, the administration has empowered a general and officer corps capable of winning the war on the ground. Now it must develop the media corps that can win the war on the airwaves. June 2007 saw a dramatic turnaround in our military fortunes, with the insurgents in headlong retreat in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diayala. But al Qaeda continued to dominate its chosen battlefield: America's living rooms.
The War on the Ground
In the first month of full implementation - June, 2007 - the "surge" strategy of General David Petraeus resulted in a 32% decline in Iraqi deaths. An anti-al Qaeda alliance of Sunni chiefs, Coalition forces, and the Iraqi Army drove the insurgency out of most of al Anbar, and much of Baghdad.
Over the past three months, I was privileged to observe "surge" operations as a reporter embedded with combat units. I assure my readers: these operations were no mere repetition of the futile "clearing" raids of the past. General David Petraeus has implemented a regimen based on a career-long study of counterinsurgency. The revised tactics include meticulous census taking of persons and vehicles; skilled, persistent diplomacy with tribal leaders; incorporation of local intelligence; constant foot patrols in the residential areas from platoon and squad sized outposts; and persistent perimeter control of areas cleared and held.
4th Generational War
But in the flush of battlefield success, public perception of American military progress continued its calamitous decline. According to Pew Research, the percentage of Americans who opine that America's military operations are "going well" slid from 38% in May '07 to 34% in June; those who believe our military operations are "not going well" increased from 57% of respondents to 61%.
The same Pew poll found that only 30% of the public could identify General David Patraeus and only 27% could identify Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. 59% of respondents were unaware that Shi'ites constitute the majority religious group in Iraq. Precise knowledge of the war's progress is obviously scarce. Yet 95% of respondents have defined opinions on the success of our arms.
What explains the downtick of confidence against a backdrop of success?
Since mid-2005, al Qaeda has aimed not to defeat the Coalition militarily, but to drain American public support politically. The strategy was forced on the insurgents by a string of failures in 2004 and 2005. The Baathist groups and their al Qaeda allies planned first to establish a geographic base of control within Iraq; second, to block Iraqi elections; and third, to prevent the establishment of the Iraqi Security Forces. They failed to achieve any of these goals.
The ensuing strategy was dictated by weakness. Mass killings of Shi'ite civilians - a tactic designed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi over the initial protests of the al Qaeda leadership - replaced military confrontation as the insurgency's operational focus. Civilian atrocity is, by definition, easy to implement, as it targets what is undefended. The strategy does nothing to "win hearts and minds." Support for al Qaeda has dwindled to under 2% among the Sunnis of Iraq; among other groups, it doesn't register at all. Nor can atrocities advance a political agenda, or control real estate.
But the mass killings were a boon to recruitment. The slaughter of Shi'ite civilians provoked retaliatory attacks by Shi'ite militias - attacks that were often as random as the carnage that initiated them. This enabled the insurgency to recruit, albeit from a diminishing population base. In effect, Sunni radicals kept the insurgency alive by sucking the blood out of their own community.
But al Qaeda's largest harvest from "random slaughter" strategy was realized in America. Through acts of indiscriminate violence transmitted by the media, insurgents brought their war to America's living rooms. The atrocity-of-the-day is the principal informational input most Americans receive. This forms their knowledge base. The public does not live in the villages and mahalas of Iraq. Patterns of recovery, of normalcy, are not evident.
This is the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. And al Qaeda is clearly winning it.
The Battle of GRPs
The volume and type of informational inputs received by the voting public can be calculated with Gross Ratings Points.
Gross Ratings Points (GRPs) are a measure of the reach and frequency of a message. GRPs encapsulate how advertisers influence economic decisionmaking. Mathematically, GRPs are described thus:
FxR%=GRP
...where "F" equals frequency of the message in a given market, and "R%" equals the percentage of reach within that market.
Political consultants also deal in GRPs. For a handy reference, Congressional and Senate Campaigns tend to buy 800-1,200 points a week for advertising on TV. A campaign would want at least 800 points behind each message/ad. (When I managed campaigns I liked to run 1,000 GRPs a week in every applicable media market.)
If a message has thousands of GRPs behind it, you will be able to sing the jingle along with the commercial.
In 2005 I made an over-simplified calculation of the number of Gross Ratings Points expended on coverage of the war. Below I have updated and expanded that calculation.
"F" - frequency of news viewing of the Iraq war coverage -- can be approximated using the regular Pew Research Center Surveys of People and the Press. In the most recent Pew survey, 30% of respondents said they followed "news about the current situation and events in Iraq very closely."
Pew does not identify the number of reports that represents the variants of "closely," so I have assigned a number of TV reports viewed to those terms for a rough calculation:
Very Closely=6 TV Reports per week
Fairly Closely=4 TV Reports per week
Not Too Closely=2 TV Reports per week
Not At All Closely=1 TV Report per week
The Pew surveys vary somewhat in sample size, so for the purpose of uniform calculations, I have normalized the sample size at 1,200 respondents.
With those two modifications, Iraq war GRPs can be calculated. Here's an example:
June 2007:
30% Very Closely 360 people viewing 6 reports=2160 Reports
36% Fairly Closely 432 people viewing 4 reports=1728 Reports
18% Not Too Closely 16 people viewing 2 reports=432 Reports
15% Not Closely at All 180 people viewing 1 report=180 Reports
1% Not at all 12 people viewing 0 reports=0 Reports
Applying the GRP formula of FxR%=GRP, we multiply the number of total reports in a week by the percentage that each viewer represents of the audience.
4500x.083=373.5 GRPs per week or 19,422 GRPs a year, June 2006 to June 2007.
Now the process gets trickier. To correlate the impact of this coverage of the war with shifting perceptions of its success, we must separate out "optimistic" and "pessimistic" reports. The largest study on this subject, conducted in 2006 by the Media Research Center, was confined to cable news. So our first assumption is that cable coverage, with FOX News Channel to the right of the mainstream, and CNN and MSNBC to the left, will mirror the optimism and pessimism of broadcast networks overall.
The Media Research Center defined as "optimistic" coverage that "reported on achievements or victories" for coalition forces. It defined as "pessimistic" reports that emphasized "setbacks, misdeeds or pessimism about [coalition] progress in Iraq."
The MRC report, "The Iraq War on Cable TV," concluded the following:
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø <!--[endif]-->On Fox, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 3-to-2;
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø <!--[endif]-->On MSNBC, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 4-to-1; and
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø <!--[endif]-->On CNN, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 6-to-1.
From this, we can conservatively infer that at least 65% of coverage is pessimistic, compared to 35% (at most) optimistic. Stories of the daily car bombing do not have to be biased. They are inherently pessimistic.
The daily car bombing is the message the insurgents want.
Extending these assumptions mathematically: There have been 12,624 pessimistic ratings points from June 2006 to June 2007, compared to 6,798 optimistic reports.
These gross ratings points form the knowledge base of the viewers and telephone owners who answer polls - and of the voters who elect public officials.
Support for the war peaked out in May 2003 with 74% of respondents saying the invasion was the "right decision." By June of 2006 that was down to 49%. Right now only 40% say it was the "right decision" with 51% saying it was the wrong decision.
Over the measured period, a net 56,556 pessimistic Gross Ratings Points caused a 34 point swing in the polls. But the pessimistic GRPs are earning fewer converts over time -- the largest swing coming in 2003-2004. This indicates that the American 'center' is fluid and easily swayed. Al Qaeda's media war has reached the zenith of its marginal effectiveness at the same time that its ground war is in rapid decline.
I have attempted this rough measure of the effectiveness of al Qaeda's 4th Generation War - and it is admittedly rough! - because of the growing dichotomy between what is happening in Iraq, and what the public thinks is happening. The Coalition and al Qaeda are fighting two different wars. While General Petraeus strangles the insurgent hydra head-by-head, al Qaeda's message of slaughter and despair saps the American public of its will.
The political impact of al Qaeda's media war is all-too-obvious. Not only has the administration lost control of Congress - it has increasingly lost control of its own party.
A congressionally-imposed defeat in Iraq may be averted by a swing in the polls, or more precisely, a swing in the GRPs that move the polls. Given the military's long standing Public Affairs policy of media neutrality, the administration and the Generals will have to earn the GRPs in a hostile media environment. This is difficult, but not impossible, given the substantial American center - Citizens who would prefer victory if given reason to hope.
Alternately, Congress could defy the polls. Al Qaeda is running its war on smoke and mirrors - or, more accurately, on bytes of sound and sight. Congress could act on General Petraeus' reports from the ground, rather than broadcasts generated by insurgents. This requires a simple commitment - one foreign to many in the elective branch: Leadership.
Americas Majority Foundation board member J.D. Johannes is a former Marine, television news producer, and media consultant. He recently returned from his third trip to Iraq filming a follow-up to his 2005 documentary Outside The Wire available at outsidethewire.com.
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