Heart of the Matter 3.27.08
- By Barry Eisler
- Published 03/27/2008
Barry Eisler
After graduating from Cornell Law School in 1989, Barry Eisler spent three years in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, and then three years in Japan, where he earned his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center. Eisler's books have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year; have been included in numerous "Best Of" lists; and have been translated into nearly twenty languages. A film version of the first book in Eisler's John Rain series, Rain Fall, will be released by Sony Pictures Japan in March 2009 and stars Gary Oldman as Rain's CIA nemesis William Holtzer. For more, please visit www.barryeisler.com.
Increased Iraq Violence = Success
No, you didn't read the title wrong -- Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell really did say that the new fighting in Basra, in which US-backed government forces are battling Shiite militias, "looks as though it is a by-product of the success of the surge."
I suppose the description isn't surprising. After all, President Bush himself (or a speechwriter similarly unafflicted by a sense of irony) has the dubious distinction of having coined the term "catastrophic success" to describe the invasion of Iraq.
Presumably, were there no new fighting in Basra, the Pentagon would acknowledge the reduced violence was a sign of failure (insert facetious emoticon here). But of course, the Pentagon has previously claimed the opposite -- that reduced Shiite violence was a sign of success. In fact, "surge" supporters have so frequently trumpeted the success of the strategy precisely on reduced violence grounds that it's not even worth offering a link -- just Google "surge is working."
So here's the problem. If reduced violence = success and increased violence = success, then anything that happens in Iraq is success. If all this success meant we were going to leave Iraq, the doublespeak might have a silver lining. But of course it's intended to have the opposite effect. William Saletan pointed this out all the way back in 2004 in Slate.
What would happen to a CEO who told her board of directors that increased sales and decreased sales were both signs of success? To a doctor who assured a patient that both improving and worsening symptoms were signs of a return to health? To a stockbroker who counseled a client that he was getting richer whether his portfolio was up or down? And yet this is precisely the argument war proponents repeatedly make.
The irony is, a refusal to articulate actual and logical metrics by which success and failure can be measured is a certain prescription for... well, for failure. The double irony is that when the inevitable failure occurs, the people who caused and supported it will blame everyone but themselves.
No, you didn't read the title wrong -- Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell really did say that the new fighting in Basra, in which US-backed government forces are battling Shiite militias, "looks as though it is a by-product of the success of the surge."
I suppose the description isn't surprising. After all, President Bush himself (or a speechwriter similarly unafflicted by a sense of irony) has the dubious distinction of having coined the term "catastrophic success" to describe the invasion of Iraq.
Presumably, were there no new fighting in Basra, the Pentagon would acknowledge the reduced violence was a sign of failure (insert facetious emoticon here). But of course, the Pentagon has previously claimed the opposite -- that reduced Shiite violence was a sign of success. In fact, "surge" supporters have so frequently trumpeted the success of the strategy precisely on reduced violence grounds that it's not even worth offering a link -- just Google "surge is working."
So here's the problem. If reduced violence = success and increased violence = success, then anything that happens in Iraq is success. If all this success meant we were going to leave Iraq, the doublespeak might have a silver lining. But of course it's intended to have the opposite effect. William Saletan pointed this out all the way back in 2004 in Slate.
What would happen to a CEO who told her board of directors that increased sales and decreased sales were both signs of success? To a doctor who assured a patient that both improving and worsening symptoms were signs of a return to health? To a stockbroker who counseled a client that he was getting richer whether his portfolio was up or down? And yet this is precisely the argument war proponents repeatedly make.
The irony is, a refusal to articulate actual and logical metrics by which success and failure can be measured is a certain prescription for... well, for failure. The double irony is that when the inevitable failure occurs, the people who caused and supported it will blame everyone but themselves.
