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Thursday, August 25, 2005

The Answer Is Protest Babes!

The question is: How do we win this War ?

Patrick Ruffini feels that we are not telling the right story.
pinkshirt1.gifFor two years now, the dominant conservative frame on Iraq has been to point to the steady, unheralded progress ignored by the media. Schools being built. Troops being trained. Elections. The economy picking up. By definition, these kinds of transformations don’t happen overnight. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
This narrative served us well for a time, playing into widely held suspicions of media bias, but now something different is called for.

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This narrative is nothing new: we had it for a while in the spring, and now it’s time to get it back. It’s simple: everything – EVERYTHING – pivots around the Iraqi woman with purple ink-stained finger, or the Revolution babes in Lebanon, or the jailed democracy protesters in Egypt. That’s why we are being viciously attacked. That’s the narrative. That’s the first three quarters of the policy speech. It’s not that we shouldn’t be talking about progress on the ground. It’s that there's a better way to talk about progress than as fingers.jpga whiny alternative universe the media won't cover. Use the progress to explain the violence, and by talking about the progress you implicitly talk about the violence too. It's not pollyannish either: extreme violence provoking extreme evil -- both can be given their due in one construct. The level of violence is not the success criteria; our will to defeat the inevitable opposition we will face is.

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He presents a well written argument on how we should be discussing this War, and thus the path to Victory.

Read the whole thing.

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