The Whole Thing

...faellt mir nichts ein.

Regarding Saddam, now in custody, nothing occurs to me at all - at least nothing that won't already have been said or posted or shouted - or messaged from the barrel of an AK-47 aimed into the air. I'm happy to let the Iraqis, the CPA, the US military, President Bush, the anchors, the correspondents, the experts, and whoever else have the floor while I sit back and soak up the details that emerge about this long-awaited event.

Open War...

David's Medienkritik links to a story that deserves a lot more attention, in my opinion: Germany’s “Peace” Movement Actively and Openly Supporting Iraqi Terrorism. I know there was a similar story about similar activity in Italy a few weeks ago - activists raising funds for killers.

I'm not an expert on international law, but I believe that the United States - and other Coalition countries, too, for that matter - would be justified in demanding that such activities be terminated, and even of taking direct action themselves if the German civil authorities failed to do so. If this open support of war against the US and its allies is more than an ugly gesture - and possibly even if that's all it is - it may be time to make an example of someone.

Victor Davis Hanson...

...puts things in perspective as incisively as ever, but notes:

"We are beginning the third year of this multi-theater conflict, and it resembles the Punic War after the Carthaginian defeat at the Metaurus in 207 B.C."

C'mon, VDH! I mean, like, everyone knows thaaaat!

Probably Not the Worst Exaggeration in Two+ Centuries

As we well know, there are many devices in wide usage that Al Gore did not invent - among them the phrase that this or that Bush policy is the "worst ever." Such charges depend for their impact on the absence of interest, knowledge, or active intelligence among the already-persuaded or easily persuadable. Thus, even though evidence of recovery has reduced the frequency of "worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover" charges, the Democrats continue to describe post-Y2K job losses as the worst ever under a sitting president, homing in on that segment of the electorate so unfamiliar with economic matters that they would blame a president for a recession that began prior to his having been elected. Similarly, Gore's recent statements about the decision to remove Saddam Hussein's regime from power seek that segment of the electorate whose ignorance of history is matched only by the hypocrisy and moral dereliction of their would-be leaders.

Though Gore's remarks on Dean’s behalf have been reported widely, rightwing masochists may wish to sample the toweringly condescending, preaching to slow ESL schoolchildren flavor of Gore's stumpish statement directly, and may still be able to find a video at the C-SPAN site (Iraq comments begin at 20:22 of the RealPlayer file). Print quotations cannot convey the growling Gore guttural on words like "matter" ("no minor myaaaater"), off which his plangent pseudo-populist rhythms pivot. For those of us who have been dreading the prospect of a yearlong Dean campaign not least on aesthetic grounds, watching Gore in action is a reminder of just how unpleasant things might have gotten. For the rest of you, here is what Gore said after he and Dean had, in the words of CNN's Jeannie Moos, "spent the day holding hands, looking like twins in their blue ties, unbuttoning in unison":

I realize it’s only one of the issues, but, my friends, this nation has never in our two centuries and more made a worse foreign policy mistake than George W. Bush made in putting our troops into that quagmire in Iraq. It was a horrible judgment, misjudgment, and therefore it is not a minor matter to me that the only major candidate for the nomination of my party that had the good judgment, experience, and good sense to feel and see and articulate the right choice was Howard Dean.

This description of President Bush's Iraq policy outbids even Wesley Clark's claim that it represents America’s "greatest strategic blunder of the post-war era," but the two statements provide similar difficulties for anyone trying to figure out what, if anything, they are really supposed to mean. One problem is that the argument is being made from within the world's pre-eminently successful nation. The old saying meant to express the cynicism underlying politics, diplomacy, and war - "worse than a crime, it was a mistake" - applies less well to the United States than to most nations, for virtually everything that the United States has done in in the world has, in objective terms, sooner or later worked out alright, at least for the US. Our real, unsalvageable foreign policy mistakes have been the ones that ignore or contradict the country's unifying moral vision: the refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Nazi years or, later on, to take direct action against the death camps; more recent failures to act in Rwanda, or earlier in Yugoslavia; or, more on point, the failure to defend Iraqis who partly at our urging rose up against Saddam in 1991, and who, along with their wives, children, and elders, died in the hundreds of thousands.

The narrowness of the Gore-Dean-Clark strategic vision is as dangerous as its moral blindness is unforgiveable. Thus, equally on point but less exclusively a moral "mistake," the long policy of compromise, complacency, and retreat in the Middle East - from Lebanon, through Somalia, through Saddam's ceasefire violations, through the first WTC attack and the embassy bombings, among many other provocations - arguably did great harm to American interests, inviting escalation up to the events of 9/11/01. The Democrats now loudly promise more of the same, beginning with the handover of responsibility in Iraq to the UN - the kind of simultaneous strategic and moral failure that led a retreating United States to involve itself in WW I, create the League of Nations, but then flee the scene. There have been so many lies and distortions spread around Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Cold War episodes, that I hesitate to pass judgments, but bringing down Mossadegh in Iran in favor of the Shah may have been another such two-sided blunder, with dire effects on our own interests and on the entire region - beginning thirty years before Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Beirut, and still being endured in the present day.

Democrats like Gore and Dean dispute the relevance of Iraq to the "War on Terror," but this argument is a position, not a fact, regardless of the state of evidence regarding Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda. What seems undeniable to me is that, just as 9/11 represented one of the worst attacks by foreigners on US soil since the War of 1812 (arguably another great American blunder), and bespoke further dangers as great or greater than any the republic has faced since its founding, the strategic response has entailed some of the most ambitious goals that US policy makers have ever set before us, and some of the greatest risks that they have ever taken. In this context, it is far too early to declare the Bush policy either a success or a failure. At this stage even a merely preliminary overall assessment would remain subject to reversal by the next news alert.

How the Democrats' imaginary President Gore or the Republicans' nightmare President Dean would really have responded to the strategic challenges of our times, if either had been in office rather than President Bush, is an unanswerable question, but we can draw the outlines at least of what the Democrats want us to believe they would have done - and I hope to make an examination of this alternative scenario and its larger implications the topic of a future post. In the meantime, on Iraq specifically, it's worth recalling that, a few years ago, Gore was willing to claim that failing to march on Baghdad to finish Gulf War 1 was also a mistake. What's changed for him, other than political convenience? In his endorsement speeches Gore shrugged a concession regarding Saddam - admitting that we were "all better off without him." In other words, he believes that this worst of all mistakes did some real good for "all" of us. Obviously, Gore assesses the costs - either those already incurred or those he's seen in his perfect vision of the future - as too great. If so, then he may be seeking to re-invent JFK's famous call to the defense of freedom as "bear only small burdens, only at a low price." Or maybe his statements are so vacuous, so desperately unserious that they’re offensive - even if Iraq is "only one of the issues."

Ahlan wa Sahlan to Visitors from Hammorabi!

When I noticed on my stats page that I was getting a rush of visitors from Sam's Hammorabi blog, I at first wondered why a single comment I left under one of his posts might have attracted so much attention. I attributed the new traffic to the popularity of the Iraqi bloggers, whom many of us consider the most welcome new additions to the blogosphere since the blogosphere was born, but last night, when I returned to Hammorabi, I was surprised and a little disbelieving when I saw my own blog enrolled near the top of the page. I immediately clicked on the link, just to be sure that there wasn't some other "The Whole Thing" out there that Sam had picked up.

It's hard for us who supported the liberation of Iraq not to see the emergence of these vital new voices as unambiguous proof that we were on the right side: If bloggers like Sam, Omar, Alaa, and Zeyad represented only 1% of the Iraqi population - indeed, if they were the only Iraqis exulting in their new freedoms - it would arguably be moral justification for America's best efforts on their behalf, especially in light of the moral debt that America and its allies owe Iraq after decades of compromises with Saddam, countless billions of petrodollars to his regime, more than a decade of economic sanctions that hurt average Iraqis before they came close to touching the supposed targets, and multiple betrayals of Iraqis who fought Saddam at least partly at our urging. I don't mean to suggest that any nation can base its policies on the fates of a handful of individuals - that would obviously be naive - but I strongly believe that these men stand for a better future, not just for Iraq but for all of us. I'm sure that, after getting to know Sam and his colleagues, most Americans would, like me, find the idea of abandoning them unbearable even to contemplate.

For these reasons and others, I have to say that I feel honored to have my blog listed so prominently at Hammorabi. (Even if it's some kind of mistake, then I still thank Sam for the new traffic accidentally sent my way!) For those of you who came here hoping to find another unique and invigorating Iraqi voice, and are perhaps disappointed, I hope you will look around a little anyway, get something out of whatever you find, and feel free to leave any comments, questions, or suggestions.

Salaam, Shalom, and Seeyalater

Current Discussion: Iraqis will finish off the Baath Party

With a hit by Instapundit and an inspiration from Alaa at Healing Iraq, Dale Amon's suggestion on the already-popular Samizdata site that Iraqis will finish off the Baath Party, and should simply be allowed to do so, has already started some useful discussion. One respondent, RAS, in the post's comment section, makes the sensible argument that, instead of backing the "rats" into a corner, the Coalition should be offering the Iraqi resistance some reasonable calculation from self-interest leading them to surrender or leave the field. In theory, they may eventually see the Coalition as offering them a better chance for survival (in some instances even prosperity) than their fellow Iraqis. My own take, in the post's comments section, extends the same line of argumentation advanced in "Already Over," and also looks to the calculation from self-interest that the Bush Doctrine has been seeking to impress upon Iraqis, Palestinians, and the entire Muslim world.

Thanksgiving + Funerals = Balance

Though Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine, Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping, and others have all taken turns exposing the artificiality of the "Bush doesn't go to soldiers' funerals" story, no one has been on it like our favorite ranting professor, even while she's been focusing even greater energy on media reaction to Bush's Thanksgiving surprise. Now, as her most recent "News Cycle Roundup" makes plain, the two themes have been joined together, with a big help from former Clinton spokesperson Joe Lockhart.

The soldiers' funerals story, which provides an easy way to "balance" the positive PR from the Baghdad trip, has been generated in somewhat the same way that the equally inflated uranium-Niger story was created over the Summer. First, an op-ed appears that makes the initial charge. Then, a series of follow-ups in the news pages, often in the form of oblique references rather than direct reporting or analysis, build a background buzz. By the time the narrow item has been broadened into some generalized assault - "Bush lied about Saddam's nuclear program" or "Bush avoids grieving families" - it can also be treated as common knowledge, especially by Bush's political enemies. It then falls to people like Professor Dauber to sort fact from fiction, and to try to force the mainstream media to do their jobs.

I think that in the past, before the existence of the blogosphere, the media must have gotten away with this stuff regularly, but were also much more concerned about being responsible: There were fewer outlets and fewer sources, and being exposed as biased and incompetent might have carried a heavier price. It is also generally believed that the press and public during the period between World War II and Vietnam were loathe to think the worst about our political leaders, and were at the same time more unabashedly patriotic.

This story has been told many times before, and, perhaps because it's usually told by the press itself, the moral is usually that we have all become more cynical, and wiser, but that journalists learned to revere the truth, however unpleasant. Yet in our own time, an alternative narrative is developing, one of media bias and politicization sometimes attributed to fragmentation and at other times, paradoxically, to overconcentration of ownership. Whether seen as corporate flunkies or the pampered products of liberal elite indoctrination, journalists are no longer trusted to tell the truth. As though to pre-empt the criticism, and simultaneously to lend their reporting an element of lively narrative tension, they constantly strive to give an impression that they are seeking to tell the "fair and balanced" truth - equally an impression that they would tell the truth even if it happened to be very unpleasant.

As we've seen over and over again in recent years, the result is that every hint of scandal is treated as a potential Watergate and every hint of a military setback recalls Vietnam. It also seems to mean that journalists are willing to spread ugly falsehoods when there's no other way to prove their willingness to tell ugly truths.

Blame It On Cronkite

Maybe it's all Walter Cronkite's fault.

Cronkite is, of course, the living icon of journalistic integrity, the once-upon-a-time "most trusted man in America," and there is much in his career, going all the way back to the 1930s, to admire. Yet what is by now his most famous gesture as a journalist had little or nothing to do with reporting controversial facts, but rather with choosing sides - when, following the Tet Offensive in early 1968, he turned openly against US policy in Vietnam in a just-back from the front commentary - the "We Are Mired In Stalemate" broadcast:

For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster... To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Today, it is perhaps depressing enough to consider that this doubly, triply historical broadcast - a moment of cultural history that also affected political and military history - falls under a clumsy mixed metaphor, but at the time, for those fighting the war or struggling to reach judgments about it, the effect of having Mr. Trusted speaking out so unambiguously - and in terms of "cosmic disaster" and "the only rational way out" - must truly have been bracing. President Johnson himself is said to have been shaken: "We've lost Cronkite," he complained privately. Some historians go so far as to suggest that the broadcast was crucial to Johnson's strategic decision to press for negotiations with the North Vietnamese and not to seek re-election.

To be fair, the Johnson Administration and the Pentagon had done much to soften themselves up prior to the breakthrough on their media front, but no one was positioned better than Cronkite to lead the charge. Like so many present-day journalistic field marshalls, but after a Biblical generation before the public's eyes and ears whenever all eyes were focused and all ears attuned, Cronkite spoke as though qualified to render sweeping military, political, and historical judgments. He was in a unique position to vouch for himself, and his language implied - indeed, insisted - that these judgements were much wiser than those of "military and political analysts" whose opinions he gave only an "off chance" of being "right." But it is now a widely held, virtually consensual view among historians that those military and political analysts were much closer to the ground truth than Cronkite, and that the US and its South Vietnamese allies had achieved a major victory on the field, effectively neutralizing the Viet Cong as a military force. The setback to the US effort was political, not military, and would likely not have been exploitable without the active cooperation and intervention of homefront opinion leaders such as Cronkite.

As a matter of fact, even Cronkite's other most famous tele-journalistic act - though not one that anybody would criticize - was breaking journalistic objectivity to shed a tear for JFK. That other founding father of modern television journalism, Edward R. Murrow, is best remembered for humiliating Joseph McCarthy. And, of course, the great paragons of reporting, Woodward & Bernstein, were famous for bringing down a Republican. Now, I'm not about to suggest that these men were wrong or anything but scrupulously honest in their efforts. Nor do I believe that Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Aaron Brown spend their days searching for a way to advance their political agendas. Still, they and their peers from the top to the bottom of the news business have been taught and, more important, have been shown, that bias, though it should be suppressed and combatted, is unavoidable - and that, at a certain point and in a certain way, when the journalist moves from reporting facts to constructing them, it can become the highest expression of their craft. Furthermore, whether or not you're convinced of Cronkite's, Murrow's, or Woodstein's correctness, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the model for American journalism, the frame of frames, has been built on a left-tilting template, with Cronkite in particular having established the pattern of earning the people's trust, then pushing his own policy position.

As I've argued elsewhere, the war in Iraq gives America a chance to re-fight Tet symbolically - and this time to accept and exploit our victory, and at a much lower cost to all concerned. As far as the media are concerned, such an outcome - the final and conclusive contradiction of every self-assured mini-Cronkite's proclamation of "quagmire" or "disaster" - would be a new confirmation of Marx's first time as tragedy, second as farce rule. Increasingly, exposing all the "most trusted" media venues as not trustworthy at all - from the Howell Raines/Jayson Blair New York Times, to the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation and the Saddam-coddling CNN, and on and on, wherever the words "quagmire" and "American military" have appeared together - appears to be essential to the restoration of America's credibility, not just to its enemies but to its friends and even to itself.

If it's an ugly job, blame it on Cronkite, or on the caveman reflex that attributes oracular powers to the demon in the box, but we must destroy the global village in order to save it.

Current Discussion...

Some unusually well-informed and articulate participants on both sides of the Iraq war debate, and from across the political spectrum, can be encountered in the comments section accompanying this post at Harry's Place. Some of the familiar leftist rhetoric being employed - "decadent ruling class" and so on - fills me with nostalgia...

Contemplating follow-up here on some arguments advanced by members of the pro- and anti-war left - mainly under the heading of the continuity of American strategy before and after 9/11.

Iraq's Dictator-in-Waiting

CNN's Walt Rodgers has made his triumphant return to Iraq. For now, Walt's greatest claim to fame remains his wartime reporting - offered as he sped through the sand with a phone-cam fixed squarely on a Bradley's tailpipe, keeping viewers worldwide awake only through his insistently staccato pronunciation of the word "Baghdad," which divided the city into two halves, Bag and Dad, something like historical Buda and Pest or contemporary Minneapolis and St. Paul. But he clearly has not wasted his few months away from the action, and is ready for bigger things. Indeed, he seems to be intent on leaving his press pass behind, and assuming simultaneous command both of the American military and of the nascent post-Saddam Iraqi judiciary. He was able on a Saturday Capital Gang segment, for instance, to explain in not too much detail that the current US counter-insurgency strategy is of a type that "never works." Today, he's passing judgment on the Iraqi Governing Council's decision to ban the TV station Al Arabiya, an action which Walt considers undemocratic. (He undoubtedly considers the decision to issue warnings to the BBC and, gasp!, CNN a crime against humanity, though he has yet to deliver his verdict publically.)

What's next for Walt? After US commanding General Abizaid has dutifully revised his strategy according to Walt's unstated precepts, and after the IGC's Jalal Talabani has reversed his terrible decisions, Walt may have a difficult choice to make. Should he satisfy himself producing the next tapes from Saddam Hussein advocating insurrection and murder, which CNN can share with its sister networks from the Arab world and beyond? Should he return to the United States and replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary? Or should William Rehnquist finally retire, and let Walt hand down the opinion establishing once and for all that the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded nightclub shall not be infringed? Or should Walt move next to Germany, where he can personally lift the ban on the works of Adolf Hitler; to Japan, where he can ensure that Aum Shin Rikyo gains full, unfettered access to all media; or to Latin America, where numerous groups that have previously resorted to hostage-taking in order to get their tracts published and recruitment videos aired would benefit greatly from Walt's intercession?

Such a big world, with so many people so desperately in need of Walt's wisdom - but maybe he should give Iraq another month or two, just to make sure everyone gets things exactly right. One wouldn't want the place to fall immediately back into darkness after his light has moved elswhere.