The National Strategy for Victory....over YOU

Remember C-Plus Caligula's speech last week during which he used the word "victory" no fewer than 15 times?

Turns out that Bush's National Strategy for Victory has nothing to do with military strategy, but in true keeping with the focus of this administration, it's all about changing hearts and minds -- not of the Iraqi people, but of you:

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the NSC staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented to administration officials their analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.

That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq Is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory Is Clear."

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher Gelpi, Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Feaver was recruited by the White House this year as public support for the war declined steadily in the face of mounting casualties and costs. A Newsweek poll this month showed just 30 percent of those interviewed said they approved of the president's handling of the war, while 65 percent disapproved -- an almost exact reversal of the numbers in May 2003, shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Gelpi, Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War -- that Americans will support military operations only if U.S. casualties are few.

They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause and, even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.

In their paper "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," to be published soon in the journal International Security, Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

The role of Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p."

According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.

Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another NSC staff member, Meghan O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff. Because the plan is meant as a statement of unified administration policy, the official would describe the individual roles only on condition of anonymity.

Hee. Foiled by an Acrobat file. PDF geeks like Your Humble Blogger must giggle now.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. From Day One, this Administration has always been not about policy, but about politics. These people understand the power of appealing to the reptilian brain -- to people's basest and most primitive emotion. And if they can somehow get us to that good old "We're #1!!" mentality that we see among the guys who paint themselves blue and dance around shirtless at football games in snowstorms in February, they think they can keep feeding American kids into a Middle Eastern meatgrinder while shoveling American taxpayer's cash into the pockets of their campaign contributors in perpetuity.

More on Feaver's viewpoint here.

(hat tip: Rachel Maddow)