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Archive for 'Narrative'

Narrative Closure Eludes Obama in Latest Speech

The president announced that we were “turning the page” on Operation Freedom; but what he failed to do was close the book.

Mosque Controversy Widens Say-Do Gap

by Jeffry R. Halverson In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy wrote an opinion piece in the British daily The Guardian, stating: [Bin Laden] has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by American foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its [...]

The Narrative Gap in the New PD Strategy

by Steven R. Corman A new “strategic framework” for U.S. Public Diplomacy has at long last been released. Oddly, it is a slide show rather than a paper, but perhaps that’s because it is to be the basis for a briefing today. My colleague Phil Seib has already expressed disappointment in the new proposal: It is [...]

Predator Video Hack Has SC Consequences

by Scott W. Ruston Recent headlines revealed that video feeds from the Predator, the US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for surveillance and targeting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been intercepted by insurgents in Iraq.  Early follow up analysis focuses on whether the intercept of Predator video feeds qualifies as a “hack” or whether [...]

Obama’s Nobel Speech Opens Narrative Possibilities

by Bud Goodall In Thursday’s Nobel acceptance speech, President Obama delivered the powerful narrative I had hoped to hear in his previous West Point address on Afghanistan.  I was critical of the West Point address due to: “the absence of a compelling narrative that links who we are, as a people, to what we are trying [...]

Obama’s Speech Didn’t Close the Narrative Gap

by Bud Goodall Yesterday’s speech by President Barack Obama at West Point about the future of American commitment to Afghanistan contained no real material surprises for anyone paying attention to the news reports that led up to his carefully planned and executed event.  It was an Obama speech that lacked his usual rhetorical flair but [...]

Why is Friedman So Mystified?

by Steven R. Corman Last Friday, Thomas Friedman published and op-ed in the New York Times entitled America vs. The Narrative in which he expressed bewilderment/exasperation that the anti-U.S narrative is getting so much traction in the Muslim world: Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims [...]

The Afghanistan Narrative Gap and Its Consequences

by Bud Goodall One of the important challenges of President Obama’s administration is to sell the continuation of our “overseas contingency operation” (or perhaps FATAVE) in Afghanistan to an increasingly disenchanted audience at home and abroad. But there is a worrisome absence of a good narrative–a coherent collection of stories–about why we are there and [...]

New White Paper on Extremist Ideology

The Consortium for Strategic Communication has just released a new white paper entitled Out of Their Heads and Into Their Conversation: Countering Extremist Ideology by Angela Trethewey, Steven R. Corman and Bud Goodall. The complete paper can be downloaded at http://comops.org/article/123.pdf Executive Summary Ideology is often ignored or deemed irrelevant to strategic communication because it [...]

Understand What Narrative Is and Does

by Scott W. Ruston Admiral Michael Mullen’s recent essay in Joint Forces Quarterly criticizing “strategic communication” lambastes the US government for its failures of strategic communication and the growth of a bloated bureaucracy fueling an agency-funded, contractor-filled cottage industry.  We have previously flagged Admiral Mullen as someone who “gets it,”  and it is welcome news [...]