Rigged, The Game Is

It means getting consulting advice on a war strategy from the people who are going to help you sell the war strategy.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal decided to launch a sweeping review of Afghanistan strategy, he reached out to a small, but influential, group of national security wonks.

McChrystal’s “strategic assessment group” included Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife, Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations; Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum of the Center for a New American Security; and Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual move: The military — like corporate America — likes to bring in consultants for an outside view. Take the Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq, the document that lays out the U.S. military’s near-term and long-term goals. That document gets a fresh look every year, and the most recent review included input from think-tankers.

But as our friend Laura Rozen observed, it was also a way to win the hearts and minds of an important constituency: The foreign-policy pundits and op-ed writers who would help sell the new strategy to the public.

With apologies to The Clash, this indecision's killing them.