December 4, 2005 - Who is Peter D, Feaver and why should we care? People more expert that I in the operation of Adobe’s Acrobat have discovered that he is the author of "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.", the document that the White House posted on its website claiming that it had been newly unclassified. His “National Strategy” was the framework upon which the President’s speech to the Naval Academy Cadets and the emerging campaign to sell the Iraqi war to the public has been built. That is why we should care, Peter D, Feaver is the new guy on the Administration block and he is the guy who is telling the President how we are going to win in Baghdad.

He must be a military expert, right? He must have built some kind of reputation as a genius of counter-insurgency operations. When he joined the NSC as a consultant in June of this year he must have brought new expertise to the table. He did. He presented the Administration with a study of the polls that he claimed showed that the people would support the war only if they believed that it could shown that we were winning. Peter D. Feaver is a political scientist from Duke University whose field of study is not counter-insurgency, terrorism, or even the economic reconstruction of a war-torn country. His field of study has been public opinion and specifically American Public Opinion. The new expertise he brought to the table was how to sell the war.

Dr. Feaver’s theory is that the American people will support any war that they believe that their army is winning. It doesn’t matter whether the war is justified; it doesn’t matter whether the result to be obtained by the sacrifice of lives is in the national interest; it only matters whether the public believes that the war is being won. Dr. Goebbels had the sane theory and his National Strategy for Victory was to trumpet triumphs even as the Red Army closed on Berlin.

There is nothing new in the Feaver National Strategy, nothing that is except the rhetorical emphasis. We don’t hear “complete the mission”; we don’t here “stay the course”; the slogan of the week is “total victory”. The message is that we should ignore the mounting death toll of both Americans and Iraqis and believe that we are making what this President has called “good progress”. That is the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq – sell the war to the American People.

That is the thrust of the newly released “National Strategy” and the President’s concentrated PR campaign. War is just a product that Karl Rove told us that you don’t introduce in August. You win when you can sell the war. You lose if the American public doesn’t buy. And that is why we have the new emphasis – the Feaver pitch to sell the war.