While you are correct its not my cup of tea, if I thought it would yield 10,000 critical votes in Ohio, I would subscribe to your crusade. However, IMO its a dead end street.

We simply have to disagree. I choose to use my energy and time to support my local desires in Iowa do my small part to deliver our few votes in the Electoral College to the lesser of evils. You seek to a promote a grand strategy. More power to you. I remain committed to the ground game on home turf… yard by yard, run by run.

It’s basic Narrative contest for the zeitgeist of the activist game.

I get it. It’s not your cup of tea. You excuse yourself from playing the game, regardless that it’s the only social cultural/political game there is. You’ve rationalized that you can’t win the game and only they can. That’s not true – you can win if you play. But you’re right that it’s a hard game to win.

Be that as it may, the “catch their attention” that goes to diagnosis is insufficient. Under the current President with the current zeitgeist, the diagnosis to prescription process has been corrupted. There’s a taboo restricting the American range of action.

The taboo needs to be broken and the necessary paradigm of American leadership needs to be re-normalized. If you have a better way to do that, good. Do it. But simply counting on “catch their attention” is not a solution. That goes to diagnosis, not prescription.

Nothing, nada, zilch about OIF will mean anything to ‘independents’, And, of course the people who always vote for the (D) candidate can never be swayed by any effort to rehabilitate the image of Chimp Bush, Darth Cheney, or Bush lied people died OIF.

With much respect for your ability to marshall facts about OIF, facts are often antithetical to conducting a successful propaganda campaign. Respectfully, you are titling at windmills.

It’s not just for debating opponents. It’s even more important for supporters like you and parker to learn the actual law and policy, fact basis (the case) for OIF if you would set the record straight for yourself and others.

Why? Because the arguments by most supporters have been conjectural in nature. Thus, they’ve tended to leave openings for the premises of the false narrative. Or worse, they’ve presumed false premises and, thus, effectively stipulated the false narrative even while the supporter believed he was arguing for the mission.

That’s not to say that a supporter’s conjectural reasoning is necessarily wrong or not compelling in its own right. But when he doesn’t anchor his otherwise compelling reasoning in the controlling law and policy and determinative facts of the decision for OIF, he’s likely missing a full and accurate conception of the ‘why’ of OIF.

As parker pointed out, that society-wide condition is the gap that enemy propagandists have exploited to establish the false narrative of OIF, bamboozle the American people, and handicap our nation in the contest.

Setting the record straight with the actual law and policy, fact basis of OIF closes the gap at the premise level. It’s not a cure-all, but it is a necessary foundation-setting step.

Personally, at the time, I couldn’t have given a bigger s*** whether WMDs were a factor or not. That seething, festering, terror supporting cancer in the MIDDLE of everything had to GO. Period.

Bingo. Enemy propagandists have exploited that gap. To their credit, they’ve mined a lot of gold from it.

Yet their reliance on our ignorance opens the opportunity because the false narrative they chose relies on premises that are demonstrably false, not just conjecturally disputed.

The decision for OIF is a simple fact pattern. The primary sources are straightforward. Once you pick up the controlling law and policy and determinative fact findings, you’ll be impressed by the audacity of the false narrative.

To go back to your concern, this goes to the underlying premise level, not the issue level. So yes, you’ll still have to do the work you saw in the first place. The goal is to set the condition to achieve a better result from the work.

Their logic is we were wrong to go, so it was right to leave, so it’s wrong to double-down on the mistake.

Our logic is we were right to go, so it was wrong to leave, so it’s right to correct the mistake.

Setting the record straight on the decision for OIF flips the 1st part of the sequence. The 2nd part (the disengagement) may not need to be addressed. The 3rd part is the work you saw in the first place, but now with a better condition.

parker:
“keeping hrc out of the Oval Office”

Recommendation: How to talk about your Iraq vote (advice to Hillary Clinton).

Did you miss that stigmatized OIF was raised in the Democratic debate while they discussed the Paris attacks?

You obviously don’t get the significance. Why do you think they refresh a “comatose horse”?

Your criticism of some aspect of the OIF episode is interesting but it misses the point because I’m talking about norm/stigma with the OIF paradigm of American leadership. It’s more than an episode for them. It’s thematic. It’s an active premise.

Consider the vast investment the Democrats/Left made in the false narrative of OIF and all the profit they’ve gained from it, including the Presidency. For the 9/11 generation of leftists, it’s their version of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

I’ll break down the effect on the war effort again.

“Catch their attention” is just a step in the decision-making process. It’s not a solution by itself.

The shock of a terrorist attack, like the Paris attack, causes a reaction that goes to diagnosis. Formulating a prescription is another step. Applying the treatment is another step.

Prescription should follow logically from diagnosis. It did under Bush. Yet under the current President, the American leadership response has fallen short of the problem.

Cornhead summarized Fiorina’s remark on the matter. The President always uses a false-choice fallacy of do nothing or full scale war to justify insufficient action.

The image for the ‘full scale war’ taboo is stigmatized OIF.

Not-like-Iraq has been a constant in Obama’s ME policy. The sloppy Libya regime change was explicitly not-like-Iraq. The Iran deal is not-like-Iraq in its contrast to UNSCR 687. His sham red lines for Syria were not-like-Iraq. His course change with Iraq was not-like-Iraq.

When Obama sarcastically challenges detractors (ie, Republicans) for ‘better ideas’, he knows the better ideas run up against stigmatized OIF. He knows they won’t be a threat because Republicans have conceded the stigma of OIF.

As an active premise, stigmatized OIF underlies the issues that “catch their attention”. It’s not a “comatose horse”. Past diagnosis, the restrictive effect of the taboo on prescription has been pervasive. We see the insufficient treatment as a result.

In order to restore the necessary American range of action and leadership, the OIF taboo must be broken. That means de-stigmatizing OIF and re-normalizing the paradigm of American leadership manifested with OIF.

However, ‘folks’ like parker also understand that rehashing OIF is best assigned to historians 20-50 years from now. There is nothing to be gained in the here and now by whipping that comatose horse. Its futile and a waste of breath and energy. Its like explaining to the voters that Goldwater was the best candidate in 1964 (which was true but that is so much water under the bridge) while they scratch their heads over what is gold water (?).