tdaxp

"Failed Mutiny?," by Jimmy Chuang and Rich Chang, Taipei Times, 22 March 2006, page 1, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2006/03/22/2003298577 (from The Korea Liberator).

"C.I.A. Fires Senior Officer Over Leaks," by David Johnston and Scott Shane, New York Times, 22 April 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/washington/22leak.html (from Just One Minute, hat-tip to Larwyn).

During the run-up to the Iraq War, remember how the neocons kept claiming that the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department are subverting our elected government.

Well, they were right.

State: Check
CIA: Check

And surprise, surprise, the latest ne'er-do-well is a Kerry supporter.

"Exporting democracy: not a job for State," by Thomas Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog, 16 July 2005, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002059.html.

Remember PISRR: Penetrate-Isolation-Subvert-Reorient-Reharmonize: the five steps to victory? The Joe Wilson shenanigans were an Isolation attack on the President, trying to separate him from American people. Here's word on another part of the anti-Bush Doctrine effort: Subversion by the State Department

Review of Larry Diamond's book on the CPA in Iraq (Squandered Victory and David Phillips' bitch-session on how all that brilliant postwar planning at State was ignored by the Pentagon (Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco.

How good was the State postwar planning effort?

Many critics of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq (including Diamond) have cited this project as an enormous opportunity lost, because of turf battles between the State Department and the Pentagon. By this account, Foggy Bottom had planned for a post-Saddam Iraq, anticipating many of the awful things that could go wrong. There is only one problem with this version of events: for the most part, it's not true. The Future of Iraq Project was not a serious post-Saddam planning exercise for a department readying itself for war. According to the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who was perhaps the most influential voice within the democratic principles working group, it was mostly busywork for Iraqi exiles whom State wanted to guide and control. For exiles like Makiya-and some neoconservatives in Washington like me, who would have welcomed serious postwar planning in any quarter-it was clear that the Near Eastern bureau at State, which oversaw the project, did not want to engage in any planning that might make the path to war easier.

This is why the new office of stability and reconstruction ops in State will never work. State will always (and should always) want to avoid war, because it's the Department of Peace. Meanwhile, the Defense Department will always (and should always) want to avoid the peacekeeping that must inevitably follow war. What's needed is a third department between the two, one that focused not on war in the Gap or peace in the growing Core but on getting weak states from the Gap to the Core.

"Janice Rogers Brown Confirmation Vote (Live Blogging)," by Matt Margolis, Blogs for Bush, 8 June 2005, http://www.blogsforbush.com/mt/archives/004625.html.
By Matt Margolis at 04:56 PM

Janice Rogers Brown: CONFIRMED: 56 - 43

Now that the filibuster debate is shown to be a waste of time and the 4GP Republican attack on the courts steams ahead, what does this mean?

It is a waterfall attack.



Imagine that the world is one long valley. You want to change that world, to dam up the river and flood the valley to make lakes. But the people in the valley will oppose you, because if you win and have lakes they lose and no longer have their land. So how can you build your lakes in the face of this opposition?

First, build one damn near the source of the river. The once that is built, open the floodgates. Wash away the nearest concentration of enemy forces -- the closest settlement -- and build your second dam there. The first damn is the hardest to build. But once one dam is built and one lake created, the next is easy. Just open the floodgates - start a waterfall attack - and gravity destroys your enemy for you. After that, repeat.



The same thing is happening with judges. Seizing and controlling the senate is a 4GPS3/Subvert-Reorient attack. Once that is done, the Senate itself launches a 4GPS3/Subvert-Reorient attack against the Courts. A waterfall attack at work. Classic PISRR-4th Generation Politics.

"A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio," by Stephen Labaton, New York Times, 16 May 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/business/media/16radio.html? (from Liberals Against Terrorism).

The Administration's new appointee to the Federal Government-influenced Corporation for Public Broadcasting is trying to move programming away from news and commentary and toward music. This is important because it morally Isolates liberals and Reorients an influential portion of American media [PISRR].

• Morally Isolating liberals is an important goal in the Conservative program. This serves many purposes.
  
  • It breaks apart the ideological networks that support liberal 4th Generation Political attacks on the Conservative movement.
    
  • It makes it harder for those networks to spread, by "removing preachers from pulpits."
    
  • And it also messes with liberal OODA [Observe-Orient-Decide-Act] loops.
    
    To quote John Robb
    
    

    Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.

    
    
    This is the insanity which makes liberals personally attack their own leaders and other wonderful things for us.



• Likewise, Reharmonizing National Public Radio. Turning NPR from a high-brow liberal to high-brow conservative vehicle would be a coup. But it is too difficult to do in one swoop. It must be done in stages. This is the first part of a serious attempt to take away NPR's liberal voice. If Conservatives are able to hold the executive, expect news to come back later -- with "balance."

It is fascinating to see an Isolation-Reharmonization PISRR attack that leaves out the middle stage -- subversion. It is even more fascinating to watch President Bush, a natural fourth-generation politician, make his mark.

Update: Praktike does see a Subversion angle.