In July 2005 a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution named Kenneth Pollack published an editorial piece in the New York Times called "Five Ways to Win Back Iraq." The following February, he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly called "Spies, Lies and Weapons: What Went Wrong." Then, in March of 2006, he appeared on NPR to discuss his body of work and his role at the Brookings Institution.

What do all of these media appearances have in common? Pollack chose to use them as an opportunity to convey one single message: the best way ahead in Iraq is to stop fighting insurgents directly and to start giving Iraqi civilians political and economic incentives to end the insurgency themselves. Why do we care about news articles and interviews that happened more than a year ago? Because the New York Times' chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon, just reported that the US government - or at least part of it - is coming around to Pollack's view of things.

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Gordon's recent article was big news (even drawing a response from Ralph Nader). It reported from the front page of the Times that "the United States Army and Marines are finishing work on a new counterinsurgency doctrine ... [that] makes the welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy." The body of the article discussed nine "paradoxes" highlighted in the new report, including such radical statements as "the more force used, the less effective it is," and, "the more you protect your [troops], the less secure you are."

The central premise of the new doctrine is essentially that espoused by Pollack. In his words: "The most important job of military forces is not capturing and killing bad guys; it's protecting good guys." Like most other places on earth (and the Bush Administration has long agreed with this), Iraq is largely populated by good citizens. And like most other people on earth, those citizens just want to be able to go about their daily lives -- they want to go to work and bring their kids to school and go to the movies. The most effective way to create a functioning society is to make sure that these people have access to the functions they need.

On a practical level, what this change in strategy means is fewer midnight raids and less bombing from airplanes. It means more consistent interaction between troops and civilians, more attention paid to culture- and infrastructure-related institutions and, most of all, it means more troops. As the Gordon article points out, and as Pollack himself notes, a peacekeeping approach to rebuilding Iraq is a seriously people-intensive undertaking. According to Pollack's work, an effective peacekeeping force requires about 20 peacekeepers for every 1000 population. In Iraq, that implies a force of about half a million soldiers, far more than the 135,000 or so there today.

In the world of political (which is to say draft-free) reality, those troops are never going to come from America. Nor should they. They will come from a long and slow process of training a new Iraqi army - a process that must be approached slowly enough to ensure that the new soldiers carrying out peacekeeping missions during the day are not carrying out sectarian militia raids by night.

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How did Pollack's work receive so little attention? Or, if Pollack did have his (limited) moment in the sun via the Atlantic and NPR, why has his work faded from media discussion? We've often discussed the extreme media savvy of the Bush Administration on this website. One thing the PR people in the Administration know is that you don't sell a war - or convince the American populace that they are in grave danger from a pervasive enemy - by showing the world pictures of peacekeeping. You don't imbed journalists with soldiers helping people get to work. You embed journalists with people who are blowing things up and shooting bad guys.

By and large, the American media has bought the Bush sales job wholesale. And it's not just that they dropped the ball on Weapons of Mass Destructions or that the entertained the Administration's changing reasons for going to war. Rather, it's an unwillingness to question the Bush Administration's fundamental narrative in the War on Terror. In speech after speech the President has laid out a story based on the idea of capturing and killing bad guys, and the news media has only asked are we spending too much time and money capturing and killing bad guys?, not should we kill and capture bad guys? Why? Because war makes a more glorious story than peacekeeping. War gets better ratings than peacekeeping. And a war correspondent is more of a hero than a peacekeeping correspondent.

Yet the media, moving no faster than the pace of government, is starting to take note. In the weeks before Gordon released his article, the Times and many other news outlets reported on an intelligence memo stating that the war in Iraq helped recruit "supporters for the global jihadist movement." Bob Woodward's new book (a far cry from his previous Administration-sanctioned efforts), State of Denial, reports on a Pentagon memo saying that "insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year." And Frank Rich, whose longstanding opposition to Bush Administration policies literally changed his career, has finally made a book out of it, as well.

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An additional step remains for the American media. In the year-plus since Kenneth Pollack wrote his article in the Atlantic, the situation in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. At current rates, sectarian violence in Iraq is responsible for the lives of 30,000 to 40,000 people per year. Some argue that this death rate does not constitute an exceptional amount of killing. Yet I think Larry Diamond makes a more convincing argument. What more do you need before you call it what it is: a civil war.

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