the wall street journal is reporting that bush will launch yet another PR campaign win over the american public on the iraq war (note: link is to the think progress blurb about the article. no one has given be a free WSJ online account yet so i can't link to the article itself)
what is this, PR offensive number 87? how can he possibly expect it to work? most of his iraq-war related efforts in the past 3 years since "major combat" ended have been dedicated to public relations campaigns. and yet support of the war drops every time someone polls it.
when bush was first elected, he was touted as the first MBA president. maybe that's the problem here. bush apparently sees the problem with the war as a problem of marketing. if a product is tanking, you just roll out a new advertising campaign. if the campaign doesn't work, you roll out another one. but the problem with iraq is not marketing. it's not that americans don't know enough about how the iraq war is going, they know too much about it. no rebranding will erase the quagmire from their minds. the problem isn't the selling of the policy, it's the policy itself.
this morning i looked at the front page of the new york times and found no mention of iraq at all. yesterday was the same. the problem is not that the media is highlighting the bad news from iraq. the media is highlighting very little at all, even on a day when five american soldiers were killed there. since bush is unwilling to change his policy at all no matter what happens there, he's better off just leaving well enough alone and ignoring the matter entirely.
