William Arkin has a good piece at his Washington Post blog about the way the military communicates: To me, the basic dilemma from the military's point of view is, should they lean toward honest disclosure and live with the short-term discomfort that can cause? Or should they lean more toward restricting or, shall we say, "sprucing up" potentially uncomfortable news and risk the long-term loss of credibility that entails?
Arkin's post is called Tillman Okay, Iraq Being Investigated (03/06/06). The title refers to his observation that Gen. Peter Pace, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave responses during an TV interview last weekend that used strikingly similar boilerplate language in describing both the situation in Iraq and the new investigation of Pat Tillman's death and the subsequent Army coverup. Arkin describes Pace's script:
Take any problem, and no mistake is ever admitted in either execution or follow-up, every door is described as open and every option possible. There is a general sense of optimism and can-do is the consistent message.
Pace says he hopes that the government can do its job and that people will be happy with the outcome. It doesn't really matter if he talking about Iraq or Tillman. ...
If there is anything that exemplifies the say nothing, admit nothing trance of American officialdom, it is Pace's answer to a Russert question about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Well, Pace, says, I certainly believed it, meaning that he can't be accused of political manipulation when he was Vice Chairman during the run up to the war.
Is this where our political debate has come too? An honorable man in uniform like Pace can't admit that we got it wrong? Not on the talking points. "Turned out, at least to date, that we have not found any new," Pace says, suggesting that somehow Iraqi weapons could still fall from the sky.
In one way, Arkin may be giving Pace a bit too much credit. Or, more importantly, the American people too little, in this observation:
As for the difference between accidental friendly fire and a negligent homicide, his answer was so smooth and so evasive, it seemed to me it could be exactly the same for the difference between a dead end conspiracy mounted by former Ba'athists or a foreign terrorist driven insurgency or an out and out civil war: "That would be up to the lawyers," Pace demurred. Bravo.
"I'm satisfied," Pace says. It doesn't matter whether it's Tillman or Iraq. I suppose he is smart enough to know he is not speaking to the Washington or New York bubble but directly to the American people where his authority and his medals carry their own weight.
It's true that in the short term, most people are probably willing to defer to the confident statements of senior military officials. The Gulf War of 1991 didn't create a credibility gap for the generals. If anything, it enhanced their overall image with the public to dangerously uncritical levels.
But the Iraq War has not been a short one. And, even while our most senior uniformed official is reassuring us that everything's just fine in Iraq, 80% or more of the public now believe that a civil war is an immediate possibility.
In other words, most people just don't believe them any more. And the approach to public information that Arkin describes so well in his blog post is a big reason for that credibility gap. It's one thing to reassure everyone that things are going fine at the start of a war. If there are initial setbacks, people would be willing to cut them some slack to allow for unexpected events.
But when there are these constant rosy pronouncements for three years now about how well things are going in Iraq, when anyone who doesn't get their news exclusively from FOX and Rush Limbaugh can see that things are is a desperate situation there, most people can figure out that the generals are blowing smoke in our faces. I mean, 80% or so can figure it out.
The officer corps learned almost the diametrically opposite lesson on public communications from the Vietnam War than they should have learned. Realism and candor function better than phony optimism.
To quote the famous Pete Seeger song, "When will they ever learn?"
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