Poli sci professor Jennifer Murtazashvili in a Washington Post op-ed notes how divergent the narratives about the American and Israeli war against Iran are from her lived experience in Tel Aviv:
Something strange is in the air. I wake up every morning in Tel Aviv having survived another day. Sirens go off in the middle of the night; we go back to bed countless times. We wake to news that the Iron Dome intercepted the vast majority — 92 percent by official counts — of incoming rockets.
Here’s her observation about the sharp divergence between narratives and her experience:
We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe.
She is implicitly treating her lived experience as ground truth but lived experience is itself a narrow and filtered signal stream. Whether it’s actually objective, falsifiable reality is itself the problem she’s calling out.
To some degree what she’s observing has always been the case. Clausewitz wrote about the “fog of war”. Governments have always produced propaganda. Audiences have always necessarily filtered the accounts they hear through their own experience and priors. Today there is an important difference that I don’t believe Dr. Murtazashvili recognizes, at least not explicitly. The difference is not the existence of fog but its source: not too little information but too much of the wrong kind.
I would offer her this. Information is signal minus noise. The cost of producing signal has been reduced to near zero. Today there is an overwhelmingly large amount of signal and an even more daunting amount of noise. The lack of actual information is something I have complained about. The problem is not merely that people construct alternate realities, but that the ratio of noise to signal has become so unfavorable that doing otherwise is extraordinarily difficult.
After some discussion of the worried emails she receives on a daily basis from friends, family, and colleagues, she provides her analysis:
What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests. Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.
and concludes:
This is the defining feature of the alt-war. It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war: one in which Tel Aviv is burning, Washington never heard of the Strait of Hormuz before last week and the whole enterprise is doomed. Because that is the only version they can psychologically accept.
I think there’s (at least) one additional source of what I would call “noise”: the Trump Administration. That narrative varies on a day-to-day basis, so wildly that identifying the information it contains becomes increasingly difficult. When official narratives are unstable, they themselves become a major source of noise, because they destroy the reliability of one of the few high-bandwidth signal channels available during wartime.
Meanwhile, I continue to try to separate signal from noise in an environment where both the volume of noise and the instability of primary sources are unusually high..
“War never changes.”
The goal is to impose one’s will on another. The method is by taking and holding land, and controlling the people within that land. All else is folly.
The enemy’s will to resist must be broken, but the enemy’s breaking point is usually not the same. So, those who do not know Russian history have no idea of the amount of pain they will endure (Siege of Leningrad). I suspect the Iranians have a much higher pain threshold than most Americans or Israelis.
The tools used may have changed, but the Ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Persians, the British, etc. would not be surprised by the modern battlefield.
A modern jet bomber is just a catapult with longer range and better munitions. Using cannons to destroy castle walls without ceasing control is pointless. It was silly then, and it is silly now.
Sorry for the prologue. Anyway, I am not sure what information would be relevant. The US and Israel are destroying stuff and killing people, and the Iranians are doing the same to Israel and the Arab countries.
Even the most accurate information would require knowledge that is unknown about Iran.
She is delusional. Both Russia and China are supporting Iran with arms and intelligence, especially targeting information. Combined, Russia and China have almost three (3) times the US’ industrial capacity, and their capacity is comprehensive and nearly autarkic. So, Iran effectively outguns and outmans US/Israel. If the war drags on, Iran will win, and much of the West’s economy will be destroyed for lack of fuels and basic inputs, Famine is a possibility for most poor countries, and food costs may skyrocket in the West, including the US. A ground invasion of Iran will be another Den Bien Phu.
This absurd, unnecessary, unwanted, unwinnable war will profoundly weaken bothe\ the US and Israel. Israel might disappear.
You are correct about Trump. Within the first few days he declared the war was all but over. Then he said it would go a bit longer, but it was won. Then he complained about Europe not helping and we started sending ground troops. Then you add in that objectives were not really announced and Trump kept changing what they might be.
Regardless, anyone really following the war knows that our tactics have been working well. We have air superiority and have destroyed a lot of stuff. If that was our goal and we accepted that it would close the strait and cause significant economic damage then we are winning. OTOH, if our goal was regime change and keeping the strait open so there was minimal economic impact then our results are mixed.
Two side notes. First, the woman likely gets much of her news from Israeli sources. What are the chances that new is not biased?
Second, my nephew’s significant other does logistics work for one of the branches of the military. He is fairly high on the food chain so he talks with senior military often. He asked me what is wrong with our media. In his communications with officers they tell him this war has affected our military much more than is noted by media. I noted that going back to the Vietnam War the media was blamed for contributing to our “loss”. Since then we have limited our coverage of wars and sanitized events with media largely not showing us how war really looks. I know from my deployment during Desert Storm when we had access to TV it was largely portrayed as a video game demonstrating our precision bombing. In Iraq and Afghanistan journalists were limited in what they covered. Also, I think the media has done a lot of self-censoring thinking that it needed to avoid being anti-American troops.
On top of this, I dont know what the effects are of Trump repeatedly suing media which provide negative coverage. (One of the media topics at CPAC this year was how Trump defeated the media by suing them.) On top of the suits he has freely used the DOJ to investigate and harass media and other entities with which offend him. (See Anthropic.) So I dont know how much Trump and co have directly or indirectly silenced or minimized coverage but I suspect it is significant. Note that Dave is not the only following the war asking for more info.
Steve
The war undermined the ideals of limited, representative government. Instead, one person decided for a whole nation. One person decided to involve the whole world.
As for the war itself, the theocracy has wide support in Iran. Sure, not urban liberals, probably not even a majority, but deep support nonetheless. This should have and could have been known to the planners. As we have seen, that means assassinating the civilian leadership in itself would be insufficient to uproot theocratic control.
But even if the Iranian regime collapses, the damage to the ideals of limited, representative government has been done. One person can decide everything, for America, and for the world.
For grins look up the First Barbary War, Jefferson sent the Navy to punish rogue states without Congressional approval
walt moffett: For grins look up the First Barbary War, Jefferson sent the Navy to punish rogue states without Congressional approval
For grins, An Act for the Protection of the Commerce and Seamen of the United States, against the Tripolitan cruisers, 1802.
There is a persistent belief, endemic among Americans, that most people are nascent liberal democrats. You heard a lot about that after our invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t true of Iraq then and it isn’t true of Iran now. Yes, there are some would-be liberal democrats but it’s not a prevalent aspiration.
Quite to the contrary I don’t think many people from cultures other than our own are aspirational liberal democrats. Heck, I don’t think that most Americans are at this point.
The view didn’t start with Trump’s supporters—it goes back more than a century (at least).