Expect more negative political ad campaigns

Researchers declare that fear and guilt motivate better than hope.

"Smoking pot may not kill you, but it will kill your mother," says an ad from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. In the first empirical work to examine both stated intentions and actual behavior, researchers argue that this sort of negative message – evoking both fear and guilt – is a far more effective deterrent to potentially harmful behavior than positive hopeful or feel-good messages.
"Making people feel good is less important than making people feel accountable when it comes to making wise decisions about self-protection," explain Kirsten A. Passyn (Salisbury University) and Mita Sujan (Tulane University) in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research...
... good intentions can be elicited by a variety of appeals. However, getting people to actually follow through on these intentions and change their behavior requires appeals combining fear and an emotion high in self-accountability, such as regret, guilt or challenge.

If this holds, then the popularity of negative ad campaigns is due to their effectiveness in motivating people to vote. Expect more in the future.

Iranian neocons

In November 2004, two different sources pegged some Iranian leaders as neoconservatives. An article in New Internationalist likens some Iranian officials to neocons.

... the generation that led the 1979 Islamic Revolution is a spent force, tainted by corruption and discredited by its ideological straitjacket. The new generation of neocons blends the strict religious intolerance and despotism of the older generation with a more pragmatic interest in efficiency and, in some cases at least, an openness to liberal pro-market economic views. For the moment they are less marked by corruption. They are largely uninterested in the Revolution’s somewhat hollow calls for social justice. They have risen to prominence due to the failures of democratic reform and the disqualification of large numbers of popular reformers, whom the Guardians successfully prevented from running in the most recent national elections...
Some of the more prominent [neocons] have close connections to the Revolutionary Guards – the enforcers of the Islamic Revolution and the shock troops in the attacks on student and pro-democracy demonstrations over the past few years.

This Eurasianet article of the same month draws the same analogy.

The conservative movement in Iran is not monolithic, as it encompasses an assortment of interest groups. Conservatives can be broken down into two broad categories – traditionalists, including a significant portion of the clerical establishment, and neo-conservatives, who tend to be younger and newer participants in the political process. In addition, the neo-cons appear willing to embrace radical methods in pursuit of their conservative vision...
The neo-cons shot to the forefront of the conservative movement following the February parliamentary elections. The neo-con parliamentary faction has acted aggressively in trying to seize control of the country’s legislative agenda. Neo-cons tend to have strong ties with Iran’s security establishment, in particular the Revolutionary Guards, which has seen a marked rise in its power and status lately.

And now, to top things off, as a demonstration of quasi-patriotic religious fervor, Iran has declared the equivalent of "freedom fries".

Bakeries across the [Iranian] capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners' union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.
"Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to 'Rose of Muhammad' pastries," the union said in its order.

On a Jungian note, perhaps America is Iran's Shadow (A.K.A. the Great Satan), and Iranian leaders fear America so much that they are blind to how much they emulate that which they fear. Last month, Iran beat out the United States for most troublesome country in the world.

Iran is the country most widely viewed as having a negative influence in the world, with the US in second place, a new poll for the BBC suggests.

It is troubling that they are seeking nuclear power, given that they have a apocalyptic counterpart to Armageddon.

Just call the new messiah "hotline." Or log on to Bright Future News Agency to get the latest religious readout - all part of the effort by freshly rejuvenated true believers in Iran to spread their message of the imminent return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam who is expected to return to impose justice and spread peace.
Paving the way is a renewed commitment to "Mahdaviat" beliefs by the ultraconservative government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
These ideologues see the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and efforts to rekindle its revolutionary ideals, as critical to paving the way for the Mahdi's return.
They say that return - which they believe will happen soon - will prompt a global battle between good and evil (not unlike biblical "Armageddon" interpretations), and herald an era of justice, peace, and the ultimate triumph of Shiite Islam.

The long war

In 2004, ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer warned in a BBC interview:

Mr Scheuer said US policies risked "an extraordinarily long and bloody war" against al-Qaeda.

It seems he was unintentionally prescient. The Pentagon recently embraced the term "long war". No longer merely a war on terror, a term criticized as merely an attack upon a technique, the scope has expanded to a global scale of indefinite duration.

US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces...
Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: "When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades."

They're going to have to innovate further with regard to ideological warfare. The USSR ultimately collapsed because it could not economically sustain its military-industrial complex. Such restrictions do not directly apply to transnational 4GW threats.

Further in the piece:

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.
The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate "an indirect approach", building and working with others, and seeking "to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

That's asymmetric warfare by another name. Psychological unbalancing also hints at Boyd's strategy.

An effective pilot explodes his rival's comfortable view of the universe. With his familiar clues hopelessly scrambled, a rival under pressure will usually try to interpret the mess from his accustomed perspective. While the confused rival struggles ... the savvy pilot quickly executes yet another set of maneuvers, once more scrambling the parts and further feeding his opponent's confusion. Ultimately, Boyd wrote, the winner "collapses his [adversary's] ability to carry on." You win the competition by destroying your opponent's frame of reference.

That being said, how does one collapse the reference frame of global Islamist extremist, a transcendant ideology due to its religious basis? In contrast, communism was merely a materialist ideology, and thus directly subject to falsification via the scientific method.