rebranding

marketing bollocks gets everywhere.
now the american armed forces have been caught up in it as they rebrand the war on terror (well it was never snappy and just how do you fight a concept that can be defined differently depending on where you stand..). additionally it looks like everyone is a bit sick and tired of the war on terror. so it is time to spruce it up and repackage it.
so with a bit of a drum roll and a rustle of curtains allow me to introduce you to the long war.
much snappier, it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

brigadier general mark kimmitt is the man behind what the usa military is calling the "principles of the Long War". this is all about a different type of war that america has been used to, they are talking about it lasting 20 years or more and will be a campaign that will spam the globe.
it is all about "nothing less than the defeat of al-Qaeda across the world and its associated movements strung together by extremist ideology." (of course once this is achieved then there will be some other terrorist threat that can be mobilised against, in a sense this is the start of a consant state of war and it starts now and will not end until... well actually there probably will be no end...)

apparently this new type of warfare will involve so called "soft power" such as diplomacy (mm we have seen how well that has worked with the french.... and lets be fair we in the uk just decided to stand by george w bush and what have we got for our troubles? mmm yeah fuck all. diplomacy in this instance will mean bi-lateral agreements that will only count for as long as they are useful, no kyoto, no international courts... just diplomacy that benefits the usa) finance (yup we'll finance that dictator this year and maybe next year we will go to war against them, just like we did with saddam and the taliban). other tools of this new war are going to be trade and technology.

colonel mark bibby points to the real problem of this "You've got to start somewhere. You have to plan ahead. You have to be driving in a particular direction. If we don't start driving now or soon we'll be behind the curve."
it's not about fighting terror per se, it is about establishing an american agenda that the rest of us follow.

the rebranding works in that it changes the tone and ideas of the war on terror not in any practical way but in an perceptual way. it is based on the idea that we don't know shit from shinola.

the next thing is that attacking iran will be billed as being a brand extension.
while taking the long war to south america could be seen as new product developement, to keep the marketing parlance.


but to remind people of another great saying and something that marketeers should bear in mind at all times "if it walks like a duck, smells like a duck and quacks like a duck - chances are it is a duck".

call it the war on terror, call it the long war, call it a neocon folly, nothing is going to change the fact that the world is a fundamentally more dangerous place than it used to be, and it is doubtful it will be getting safer any time soon...