Brand Petraeus, by the numbers

As the general goes before Congress to report on the state of the surge in Iraq, a look at the story the statistics really tell.

By Tom Engelhardt

Read more: Opinion

Sept. 10, 2007 | It was about this time of year in 2002, in the halcyon days of the Bush administration, that White House chief of staff Andrew Card offered a little political marketing advice to the world. In explaining why the Bush administration had not launched its "case" against Iraq (and for a future invasion) the previous month, he told a New York Times reporter, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

It's a piece of simple business wisdom, and when it comes to manipulating the public, the Bush administration is still sticking to it five years later. The corollary, which Card didn't mention, is: Do your market research and testing in the dog-bites-man news months of July and August. And that's just what the Bush administration did in the run-up to what will certainly be its victorious battle with congressional opponents to extend its surge plan into next spring and its occupation of Iraq into the distant future. (As present White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten said in a meeting with the USA Today editorial board last week, he doesn't think "any 'realistic observer' can believe that 'all or even most of the American troop presence' will be out of Iraq by the end of Bush's presidency."

The core marketing decision was, of course, finding the right spokesman for the product. As Robert Draper, author of the new book "Dead Certain," reported recently, the president was "fully aware of his standing in opinion polls" and so, earlier this year, decided that "his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could." As Bush put it, "I've been here too long. Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn't make it on the news." Indeed.

So launching "Brand Petraeus" and providing him with some upbeat Iraqi news (Sunnis in Anbar province ally with U.S.) and numbers (violence down in August) were the two necessities of the summer. In July, the celebrity surge general, who had already shown a decided knack on earlier tours of Iraq for wowing the media, was loosed. Petraeus, in turn, loosed all his top commanders to enter vociferously into what previously would have been a civilian debate over U.S. policy and the issue of "withdrawal." This campaign, by the way, represents a significant chiseling away at traditional prohibitions on U.S. military figures entering the American political arena while in uniform. Like any top-notch P.R. outfit, the administration also put various toes in the water in August and wiggled them vigorously -- including offering rousing presidential speeches and radio addresses, especially a "Vietnam speech" to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At the same time, an allied $15 million, five-week ad campaign was launched by a new conservative activist group, Freedom's Watch, led by former White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer. The ads, "featuring military veterans," were aimed directly at congressional opposition to the president's surge strategy. In the meantime, key pundits and experts like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (who helps produce that organization's anodyne, New York Times-published tabulation of numbers from Iraq) and former invasion enthusiast Kenneth Pollack (both of whom rebilled themselves as "critics"), not to speak of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and others, arrived in Iraq. There, they were given well-organized, well-scripted, Green Zone-style Pentagon-led tours and sent back home to write Petraeus-style news releases about modest, but upbeat, "progress."

Next, of course, came the full-scale September launching of the campaign. This involved a "dramatic" presidential secret exit from the White House and secret Air Force One flight to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq's isolated western desert, one of our giant "enduring" bases. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and handpicked reporters along, Bush performed what was, as PressThink's Jay Rosen has written, not just a photo op but "a propaganda mission that required the press to complete the mission for him."

Finally, the military completed its early September groundwork by releasing a spate of new numbers from Iraq -- doubted by pundits and experts of many stripes. Military officials claimed (could anyone be surprised?) that, by their count, a miraculous August turnaround had occurred. And here's another shock: Credulous reporters like Michael Gordon of the New York Times swallowed, and front-paged, this one, too (though the Times also had a far more sober report the following day).

Under the circumstances you couldn't do it much better. And this week, we have the full-scale media spectacle of testimony to Congress by Gen. Petraeus and ambassador Crocker, along with the delivery of the so-called "Progress" or Petraeus Report, which, thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we now know -- though the mainstream media has made nothing of it -- was actually written not in Baghdad by the general and ambassador but in the White House.

Why anyone in the media or Congress takes this situation seriously as "news," or even something to argue about, is hard to tell. Think of it this way: The most political general in recent memory has been asked to assess his own work (as has our ambassador in Iraq), and then present "recommendations" to the White House in a "report" that is actually being written in the White House. You couldn't call it a political version of "the honor system"; but perhaps the dishonor system would do. Numbers in Iraq are a slippery matter at best, though again, why anyone pays serious attention to U.S. military numbers from that country is a mystery. On countless occasions in the past, these have been ridiculous undercounts of disaster.

In the midst of such chaos, mayhem and pure tragedy, of course, who exactly is counting? Nonetheless, wherever you look, numbers, however approximate, are indeed pouring out -- and when you consider them, there is no way on earth to imagine that the situation is anything but grim and deteriorating: first for the Iraqi people; second for the overstretched U.S. military; and finally, for the rest of the region and us.

So here, as Gen. Petraeus brings his product to a microphone on Capitol Hill, is my best attempt at "progress" by the numbers:

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq before the president's "surge plan" or "new way forward" was launched in February 2007: 130,000

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq by September 2008, if Gen. Petraeus' reported "drawdown" plan is followed: Approximately 130,000, according to a "senior official" quoted by the Washington Post.

Number of American troops in Iraq when President Bush declared "major combat operations" to have "ended" on May 1, 2003: Approximately 130,000.

Number of American troops Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilian strategists predicted would be stationed in Iraq in August 2003, four months after Baghdad fell: 30,000-40,000, according to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his bestselling book "Fiasco."

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq in July 2007: 162,000; in September 2007, 168,000; later in the fall of 2007, an expected 172,000 -- each an all-time high in its moment.

Number of British troops in southern Iraq, May 1, 2003: 45,000 in four provinces.

Number of British troops in southern Iraq, August 2007: 5,000, all gathered in a heavily fortified, regularly mortared base at Basra airport; number of British troops expected to be in Iraq by spring 2008, 3,000.

Number of nations that have withdrawn their troops from the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq: At least 17, according to Globalsecurity.org. Poland is expected to withdraw its drawn-down forces by year's end, and other countries have been drawing down their minimal forces as well. Among the remaining powers in the "coalition": Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Estonia, Mongolia and Ukraine.

Next page: Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in central Iraq in 2007: As low as $40