Unaccountable

The MSM is the most influential institution in the US that is accountable to no one but themselves (other than the Bush administration, but that's another post.) They dominate broadcast and print media, and they are completely out of self-control.

After allowing themselves to be baited into complicity with conservative administrations since the 1980s, they completely failed to serve their institutional function in the lead up to the Iraq War. I don’t think I even need to provide links to document my case on that subject.

Two weeks ago, they were exposed to be vulnerable (or worse, complicit) with a straight-up government propaganda effort, which I posted here.

Shockingly, none of the networks has seen fit to cover their own incompetent failures.

From the blatant sexism expressed almost routinely against Hillary, to the circus sideshow they have made of Wright’s assault on Obama, they have disgraced themselves and committed the cardinal sin of journalism: they have become the story.

Fake Schock - Real Awe

The NY Times breaks a big one.

What strikes me is not that they did it. It’s how well they did it. Organized media manipulation. This has always been the single realm of competency in the Bush Administration. From Judith Miller to Plamegate. Blackout the caskets and take fake walks through fortressed markets. Whatever else you say about them, the Rove Gang really knew how to “catapult the propaganda.”

Sure wish they had mustered some of that energy toward governing.

Another Report on this Debacle

Our own Defense Department’s think tank releases a report. McClatchy picks it up. This is the opening line:

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a
major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.

They go on.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins,
a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with
other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in
prewar preparations.

[Snip]

The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs,
with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in
Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers"
from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S.
armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there
(in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become,
at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to
expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report
continued.

The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to
halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not
enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with
its neighbors, the report said.

"Despite impressive progress in
security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong
majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal.
Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq
with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that
army."

"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a
'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David
Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"

Anything you’ve read so far that you didn’t know?

I wish reports like these mattered. If someone is a “defeatist” in the face of a conflict we “can’t win”, doesn’t that make her/him a pragmatist?

You can download the entire report here.

Fred Kagan is a Dick

I know that among whatever readers I have there is a strong contingent of NPR listeners and PBS watchers. Up until very recently, they were the only source of sane news coverage around.

So it is particularly galling to me when completely discredited people are given a megaphone on the public airwaves.

Fred Kagan is a Dick.

And The News Hour with Jim Lehrer just offered him up as an expert commentator on today’s testimony by Petraeus and Crocker before Congress.

In response, I offer you Fred Kagan as..........

the first installment of

“Your Guide to Discredited Hacks

The Essential Consumer Guide to Whom to Ignore.”

Fred Kagan – Resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), former professor of military history at West Point, self-described military “expert”. Kagan has been among the most pompous and un-repentant of the original Iraq War cheerleaders. There is no outcome that is too thin for him to declare an astounding self-vindication.

Glenzilla summarizes him here, but this is my favorite quote:

The first thing I want to say is that: The Civil War in Iraq is over. And until
the American domestic political debate catches up with that fact, we are going
to have a very hard time discussing Iraq on the basis of reality.

So hey – great news! The civil war in Iraq is over! No more sectarian killing! Does this mean we can leave now?

Here is a little bit of old Fred’s biography:

Frederick Kagan, along with father Donald and brother Robert, belongs to the influential neoconservative Kagan family, in the same vein as the Kristol and Podhoretz clans. Like his father and brother, Frederick favors hawkish foreign policies and extravagant defense budgets. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is associated with the now largely defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which his brother cofounded.

[Snip]

Established in 1997 by a number of leading neoconservative writers and pundits associated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a nonprofit organization whose declared aim is "to promote American global leadership." PNAC, which has been largely inactive since late 2005, played an important role building public and official support for a post-Cold War interventionist agenda in the Middle East and other global hotspots both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. Such was its apparent influence that some scholars gave it singular importance in shaping policy during the George W. Bush administration. Writing in the Sociological Quarterly, David Altheide and Jennifer Grimes argued that "PNAC, working with a compliant news media, developed, sold, enacted, and justified a war with Iraq."

Now I have no issue with PBS, in this case, propping Kagan up as a foil against critics of Administration policy. What I DO object to is using him as some kind of legitimate intellectual voice on U.S. policy without fully disclosing his role as a primary architect.

Fred Kagan has been wrong about absolutely everything since BEFORE the onset of this war. And every statement he makes is intended to justify his original error. What does it take to be considered an expert? A history of utter and abject failure to show correct judgment?

Even if --by some miracle -- we are able to leave Iraq in anything other than stunning defeat, the policies he advocated will be judged as a failure. They already are in the minds of the American people, regardless of the outcome at this point.

So you should ignore every single word that comes out of the mouth of this charlatan, and demand that PBS seek out intelligent policy experts to help us find our way out of this morass.

Check out the action buttons to the right; I have added the appropriate PBS link for The News Hour.

This war, too

Another offering in honor of National Poetry Month, lest we forget that this election is about something more than your candidate:

At the Vietnam War Memorial
By Craig Erick Chaffin

Black granite stretches its harsh, tapering wings
up to pedestrian-level grass
but sucks me down, here, at the intersection of names.
I forgive, I must, though I wish something
could heal this wound in the earth.

Behold, all theorists, the price of theory:
extreme unction by napalm and blood,
vets shipped home whole or in pieces:
The VA grants prostheses
But not minds free of horror.

In jungles tumescent, through villages
of straw, by the Mekong where catfish
sleep in mud-heaven, we tramped,
disarming mines and flushing tunnels,
killing women and children
for potential collaboration,
smoking Tai-stick until stuporous –
still, the sound of Charlie
played on every frond.

Beat against this polished rock, America,
this vast projective surface for your sins,
wear your bloody heart out.
It’s not how many died
but that they died in vain, achieving
nothing except our grief for them.

It’s said you cannot write a good poem
until recollected in tranquility.
Let this then be a bad poem, bad as the war,
dividing author from reader and reader from page.
Let it drive a wedge between fathers and sons.
Let fathers mistake rebellion for disloyalty,
let sons mistake honor for stupidity,
let senators mistake appropriation for commitment,
let mothers confuse waste with sacrifice,
let sisters turn to prostitution to forget.

Let teachers suicide in public in partial recompense,
let preachers castrate themselves for passive assent,
let everything in America that breathes
hang its head in irrefragable shame.
Here is the legacy of your assumptions,
here the necropolis of your dark-suited wisdom:
A city set in a pit cannot be hid…

Don't Tune In

General Petraeus is going to appear on Capitol Hill tomorrow to tell us that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has achieved some notable successes. Count on it. He could provide a bulleted Powerpoint and stay home. There will be no revelations, no true debate about what we are doing there, at what cost or for how long. There will be posturing and defense, posturing and defense. The MSM is billing this as a debate that will involve all three candidates for President and the key operatives in the war. What a joke.

Instead, it will be a kabuki dance between the already established positions of the two parties. We know the Administration line: Regardless of the facts on the ground, whether we are winning (and need to stay and shore up our victories,) or losing (and need to stay to forestall our defeat,) we can’t leave. Period.

For their part, the Democratic candidates will engage in very tense questioning, (the only unknown being whether the exchange turns ugly and embarrassing) while never actually committing themselves to doing anything “precipitous”.

This is what will pass for “holding them accountable”. No need to keep yourselves tuned in.

I was appalled to hear the MSM line up against General Fallon when he resigned recently for being too honest in his assessment of the military situation of the United States. Let’s all decide, once again, to ignore the real advice of the military.

From Steve Coll at the New Yorker via TPM:

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you
see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”) Last
week, it proved necessary for the Bush Administration to claim that an obvious
failure—Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s ill-prepared raid on rival
Shiite gangs in Basra, which was aborted after mass desertions within Maliki’s
own ranks—was actually a success in disguise, because it demonstrated the Iraqi
government’s independence of mind.

But the money quote is:

The suppression of professional military dissent helped to create the disaster
in Iraq; now it is depriving American voters of an election-year debate about
the defense issues that matter most.

God help us all.