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January 9, 2007
Grave and Deteriorating for the Children of Agnew"The choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the day of reckoning put off."The idea that the liberal press has to be overcome for conservatives truly to take power started with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, and today’s bias warriors are the inheritors, through Agnew, of that idea. So it’s not surprising to me that Spiro Agnew was yesterday lionized at RedState.com in a post by Martin Knight that tried to rouse the bias troops to further action by persuading them that nothing has changed since Agnew was criticizing those “men of the media.” They’re as powerful, as liberal, as unelected as ever. Still have a hold on public opinion. Don’t represent the people, still. A first-class hate object, as they were in ‘64. About “the rightosphere’s Jamail Hussien witch hunt,” Digby said: “It’s an ugly story all around.” Well, I agree. But when I sat down to think about the story, I didn’t start with Jamil Hussein, or the AP’s reporting, or the right-wing bloggers and their misdeeds, or even the larger shame of the cultural right’s attack on the press. In my own sorting through what USA Today called “the running six-week battle between bloggers and the Associated Press over the wire service’s report of sectarian violence in Iraq,” I started, not with the episode itself, but with the way we went into Iraq: on bad intelligence and cooked books and a phantom plan for the peace. Leaps to large conclusions from thin and miserable facts are routine in the established record of how it happened. Discredited sources left in because they were critical to a faltering case— also routine. And we know maybe ten percent of what will soon emerge when the record of those years (2002-04, especially) comes out through Congressional oversight, memoir-writing, the Libby trial, score-settling among the key players and the inevitable decline of the President’s power and reputation as he lurches on to the end. The intelligence fiasco in the build-up to the invasion is an exceedingly ugly story and rather than receding into the past, its significance grows every day. It’s like the decomposing body under the expanding executive house. More keeps coming out about the fraudulent case for war, and the consequences of having only an imaginary plan for the occupation. For Bush supporters who soldier on, the choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting that’s gone on for years or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses and keep your hand alive. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the reckoning put off. That a day of reckoning for the children of Agnew was overdue amid the mess in Iraq was the point of Rich Lowry’s column for The National Review on Dec. 19th. Speaking to fellow conservatives (and directly to warbloggers, I thought…) Lowry started slowly: “The conservative campaign against the mainstream media” has certainly “scored some notable successes.” Dan Rather’s national guard investigation and Newsweek’s Koran desecration story are mentioned. (And how great would it have been to add the Jamil Hussein saga?) He’s right: we’ve had a conservative campaign against the mainstream news media. But has this campaign been good for conservatives? Not in Iraq. “The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit,” Lowry wrote. “It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.” That such a discovery—hey, the press can be accurate, people—would be confounding to conservatives is important to know. I give Lowry a lot of credit for saying that. (Prompting Ed Morrissey to agree.) For it shows how far things had gotten. In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it. Yes, and by helping to forestall that cold look they were helping to create the huge failure that our policy in Iraq has become. As I argued in my Dec. 18 post (and the 214 comments it drew) the Bush government’s retreat from empiricism is not some unfortunate tendency or bad habit that George W. Bush fell into. It’s part of an emancipatory impulse in the political style that he and Cheney invented, right in front of our eyes. I draw attention to its down side when I call it a retreat. The upside is you are much freer to act, to invent, to surge and conceal your surging from the enemy. There’s a story I want to tell you from Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks, Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. That’s the book that recently made Republican Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon “heartsick” because it documents, on page after page, the retreat from empiricism and lack of professionalism (as well as failed oversight) in the making of the war. Ricks is discussing Retired Lt. General Jay Garner’s preparations to head to Iraq and take charge of post-war operations for the White House. This is Bush’s man on the ground, hand-picked. On Feb. 21-22, 2003 Garner convened experts from across the government for the one and only meeting they would have to bring war policy roughly in line with what they could roughly predict would happen. (The effort failed.) Ricks goes on: Of all those speaking those two days, one person in particular caught Garner’s attention. Scrambling to catch up with the best thinking, Garner was looking for someone who had assembled the facts and who knew all the players in the U.S. government, the Iraqi exile community, and international organizations, and had considered the second-and third-order consequences of possible actions. While everyone else was fumbling for facts, this man had dozens of binders, tabbed amd indexed, on every aspect of Iaqi society, from how electricity was generated to how the port of Basra operated, recalled another participant. And Warrick did just that. A few days later Rumsfeld takes Garner aside and tells him he has to get rid of Warrick. “I can’t,” says Garner. He’s good, he’s smart and he knows a ton about Iraq. Rumseld says there’s nothing he can do; the order comes from above. Garner goes to see Stephen Hadley, deputy director of the National Security Council. Hadley can’t do anything either. Later Richard Armitage explains it to Ricks. “Anybody that knows anything is removed.” And Warrick was removed from Garner’s team, undoubtedly on Cheney’s orders. Now why would the White House (Cheney) hamper the White House (Garner) in that particular way? The retreat from empiricism is replete with puzzles of this kind. That’s why it’s important for conservatives and warbloggers to ask how it happened on their watch. (From the comments at Retreat From Empiricism: “Suskind was the pass-along for a message between Republicans.”) It’s going to take a while, I think. At the New Criterion site, James Bowman has a highly skeptical piece up—called Delusions of “reality”—about the “periodic ‘reality’ jags” journalists go on, “proudly boasting of their own intimate relations with that elusive commodity and taking the occasion to pour scorn and contempt upon what they take to be the Bush administration’s unfamiliarity with same.” To Bowman, those who claim that Bush is out of touch with reality are calling their opponent in a political struggle mentally damaged. This sort of objection should be laughed out of opinion court because it transparently refuses to deal with Bush’s arguments and policies. It’s like telling me I’m in denial when I simply don’t agree with your assessment of how it’s going. Cheap trick, he says. Like you’re in touch with reality and Bush isn’t? Nice try, Frank Rich. Here’s what I would say back to Bowman. You’re like an outside director of a company where the employees are trying to signal the board that the CEO is drastically out of touch. He’s relying on flawed reporting and advisers who won’t tell him the truth because they don’t think he wants to hear it. Now you think these people are grandstanding. Their criticism sounds far-fetched to you. But one day a big outside audit says the company is out of touch with conditions swamping its business. The consensus among those in the know, including friends of the firm: the CEO’s strategy lacks reality. Maybe it’s time to take a second look at those early complaints. Lowry, a conservative, was saying what Bowman should be saying: wake-up, conservatives! “Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right— that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war.” And this is the setting in which the battle of Jamail Hussein was fought. Not only the essential accuracy of the media’s account—situation grim and deteriorating—but the fact that conservatives and Republicans were telling each other: it’s time to recognize that reality. Lowry was peddling some new religion: when the media gets it right… (And his media blogger, Stephen Spruiell, followed up with that here.) The bloggers’ battle with the AP, the largest news organization in the world, was about that old time religion. The AP is piping it, and has sources who are sympathizers. For a while there, they were feeling alive and tingly again in the church of Goldwater and Agnew. Their eyes got big: Bloggers take down Big Media, books eight and nine. Here we go again with the MSM…. And in an amazing plot twist for those who have read the series, Eason Jordan returns to the fray, working with Michelle Malkin in the big hunt for answers. The many conservatives who, according to the editor of the National Review, had lost touch with reality on Iraq lost it because they identified with Bush’s will to act— and to act “against” the liberal media. They wanted him to openly deny it legitimacy, information, cooperation, respect. They cheered the effort to roll back the press, and thought they had done a fair amount of it themselves. Lowry was saying this strategy had gone badly. “Realism is essential in any war,” he wrote, “and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources.” He should have gone further: If you really wanted Bush to succeed in Iraq, and you noticed that he could never be wrong or accept that bad news bearers could be right, this was a warning sign that the warbloggers themselves, as friends of the president’s project, should have taken the lead in discussing. Why didn’t they? The children of Agnew have been fully on his side, soldiers in his struggle, happy warriors with Bush because they believe in their red state bones the press is biased against them. Like him they also disbelieve the bad news on principle, and then find someone more loyal to look into it
Posted by Jay Rosen at January 9, 2007 1:33 AM
Comments
A cynic would argue, and I'm certainly among them, that Cheney has wanted failure from the beginning. A competent, functional Iraqi government would not be signing 30 year oil leases with western companies from a position of abject weakness. The push for war made for some strange bedfellows: neocons who wanted to eliminate a threat to Israel's territorial ambitions, the oil companies whon stood to make tremendous profits from the instability premium and the possibility of aquiring huge Iraqi reserves at fire sale prices, Islamophobic christianists, and the "American Empire" chest-beating crowd. These can be overlapping categories, and Cheney for example fits more than one. But with Cheney driving the bus - it's always been about the oil. Posted by: Gary Reilly at January 9, 2007 10:27 AM | Permalink Gary, Well written article. I am glad you are finally getting it. What I want to know- and the article I and many many others really want you to write, is why it took you until 1/9/06 to write this when most of us could have written something similar in August or December of 2003! Ok 2003 is harsh, but where was the press in 2004 when it mattered the most. We wouldn't be talking surge or unreality if the press had been honest with the public in 2004. And what about 2005? It takes RICH LOWRY to start to signal you guys??!@! Look I can almost see 2003. But 2004-2006 you guys have a lot of apologizing to do. Please please do your jobs take back the national media narratives from the crazies. Make Fox and friends pay for over buying during the Rove/Cheney media bubble. Think of this as the dotcom correction in news credibility, where the losers are taken out of the game until they can prove they deserve to return. Posted by: patience at January 9, 2007 11:33 AM | Permalink "The children of Agnew have been fully on his (Bush's), side, soldiers in his struggle, happy warriors with Bush" Yeah, except for the part where they would actually put on a uniform and really serve....that's the ultimate disconnect from reality here; that these ideological midgets are soldiers in any true sense of the word. They're happy warriors, all right, because they're SAFE warriors. The only post they valiently man is at their keyboards, or in front of a TV camera, or a radio microphone. The only hits they take are from other bloggers. None of them will ever need - or earn - a bed at Walter Reed. You want to talk reality in right-wing blogville? The reality is that this whole thing is little more than a reality TV show for them. They clog the internet the way Clay Aiken fans clog the American Idol phone lines, thinking that what they do really matters, thinking that because they mouth support, they really are a part of it all. They give glassy-eyed, cheering support for their hero, revising all facts to fit into their hero mythology. They revere Bush the way a Nascar fan reveres Dale Earnhardt, with about the same level of intellectual complexity. Except, of course, Clay Aiken, and the right-wing blogoshpere aren't likely to be blown up by an IED. And even Dale Earnhardt's kids haven't signed up to fight the "war of our generation". These people, (the right-wing bloggos, not Clay or the Earnhardt boys), are sociopaths. They are incapable of empathizing with those who have been damaged by the policies they support. They only care about the points they make in their little "campaigns" against those who disagree with them politically. And they are very careful to keep their asses far away from danger while still remaining in the spotlight. Dying or being maimed for the policies they support is for someone else to do. In other words, they are despicable. Posted by: roooth at January 9, 2007 11:44 AM | Permalink Patience, It's Prof. Rosen's article . . . I am just a commenter, though I'm flattered to get the credit and criticism. And Prof. Rosen has posted trenchant analysis of the march to war in the past; his posts on Judy Miller and The New York Times's shameful war propaganda were top notch. Posted by: Gary Reilly at January 9, 2007 12:01 PM | Permalink Malkin posts DOD public affairs video at HotAir. Commenters herald it as the "real news" from Iraq and ask for more. 'Nuff said. Bowman's piece is decidedly weird. Yes, it's true that the narrative "America is losing this war" is the narrative that Iraqis who want the US out want expressed. (Bowman calls them "terrorists" which is at best, a distortion.) It has a post-modern quality that has become more and more common among right-wing commentators--that there really is no "reality," only narrative. This is, of course, precisely what the administration is trying to do--to discredit any journalistic enterprise, as well as any and all attempts to inject empiricism into a policy debate. It's a little disturbing that the person who most clearly captures this attempt to remove reality from the debate is a comedian on deep cable, Stephen Colbert, when he says that "Facts have a liberal bias." This program is, as with apparently all the Rovian iniatives, extremely short-sighted. That this is becoming apparent to the Rich Lowrys is an indication that the attempt to keep reality out of policy discourse is ultimately doomed. The idea that the Tom Warricks are to be marginalized, and ultimately removed, is an idea that guarantees embarassing failure. And that brings us to the really inexplicable element in all this, which does, in fact, call into question the president's, for lack of a better word, sanity. Why would the white house undermine the white house? One possibility is that Warrick's plans called for participation by Iraqis in reconstruction efforts, or, alternatively, he was known to be hostile to huge no-bid contracts issued to US companies. But it really seems as if there was a systematic effort to not find out anything--that there was a systematic, focused plan to not allow reality to distort the fantastic schemes that they were hatching. When you read what the young Heritage Foundationers in the Green Zone were doing--engaging in bizarre libertarian fantasies while the Red Zone burnder--it really seems to be the case that after a generation or two of chanting their free market, anti-government slogans that they actually came to believe in them. And had no patience with facts that indicated that these were, in fact, bumper sticker fantasies. Posted by: jayackroyd at January 9, 2007 12:24 PM | Permalink Just off the top of my head, I believe the guy's name is "Jake" Garner -- not "Jay." Posted by: Dan Lynch at January 9, 2007 12:52 PM | Permalink Uh, no. Jay is correct. Here's Garner discussing Warrick with Frontline... You mentioned that the State Department had done some good planning. They had something called the Future of Iraq Project. What was the attitude towards in the Pentagon towards the work that had been done by the State Department? Weird, huh? At the risk of oversimplifying this complex soap opera of power players, Bush and Cheney's actions, and motivations, become more 'logical' (yet still deluded) when viewed from the perspective of oil imperialism. I truly believe that this administration and it's neocon think tank witch doctors want to grab and control the world's largest oil fields by 'privatizing' them for the benefit of American (actually multinational) corporations. What's delusional is that they think this is actually achievable. An added 'benefit,' from their perspective, is the lucrative defense contracts that simplistic 'our team' patriotism tends to grease politically. But those contracts usually take the form of high-tech, irrelevant aerospace pork (star wars, F-22s&35s) rather than meaningful troop and mobility products. Corporate natural resource imperialism has long been the actual goal for much of America's past CIA, World Bank, and military incursions - and the reason we have supported so many otherwise incompetent and tyrannical dictators in resource-rich Third World countries from Chile to Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, these simplistic neocons somehow still cling to a 'football field' view of military battle, rather than the 40-year-old reality of guerilla conflict, where actual occupation of a hostile populace is clearly untenable. Just because Schwarzkopf could win tank battles on open desert, they think they can occupy and direct an entire country just as easily. For all the above reasons, recent GOP administrations keep recycling the same old dinosaur defense/oil/CIA players through government. And our military acts as an 'unpaid' mercenary force, usually for big oil, mining, and 'modernization' engineering contractors. Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Chile, Vietnam, Ecuador, Iraq, Iran...they're all part of that repeatedly incompetent, ineffective, and morally bankrupt philosophy. Even more regrettably, 'our team' patriotism makes this an easy sell to 'cowboy' segments of the American public, with a few periodic swings toward rationality such as we're seeing now. My question is: Can that cycle be broken? Posted by: Stephen Thomas Howe at January 9, 2007 1:29 PM | Permalink This rejection of Tom Warrick, could it have anything to do with the ideological litmus tests given to those working on Iraqi reconstruction? This is from the Washington Post's review of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Take, for example, the story of Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a Navy reserve officer and physician with two Bronze Stars whom a colleague describes as "the single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government." Burkle was ousted a week after Baghdad's liberation because, he was told by his superiors, the White House preferred to have a Bush "loyalist" in charge of health matters in Iraq. Burkle was replaced (fully two months later) by James K. Haveman Jr., a social worker whose experience as the community-health director for Michigan's former Republican governor, John Engler, had followed a stint running "a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions." Haveman had also traveled widely "in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world." (That pro-life stance was not uncommon in the CPA: Two staffers report being asked during their job interviews if they supported the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling.) Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 1:31 PM | Permalink Great gobs of giblets, Roxanne, that link gave me the heebee jeebees. I had to take an immediate 10cc of snark. Posted by: Sven at January 9, 2007 2:44 PM | Permalink A competent, functional Iraqi government would not be signing 30 year oil leases with western companies from a position of abject weakness. ONLY a competent, functional Iraqi government can ensure that the oil flows. The big companies are not going to invest while instability continues. Cheney knows this better than anyone in the government. Ergo, Cheney cannot have wanted the occupation to fail if his true goal was to generate profits for Big Oil. Seems to me that if Big Oil truly called the shots in the US government, we would not have invaded Iraq at all. If all we wanted was the oil, the easiest way to get it would be to cut a deal with Saddam and remove the sanctions from Iraq. Posted by: Enzo at January 9, 2007 2:51 PM | Permalink I don't think Big Oil benefits by a retreat from empiricism. They want stability, professionalism and by all means let's find the Tom Warricks and get them on our side to get the oil flowing and the money moving. No, I think people have a hard time seeing how irrational the whole thing is, and self-defeating for the Bush team. In my mind there is still a mystery to be solved, and descriptions yet to come. The people who knew Cheney and said they no longer recognized him--Brent Scowcroft is one--are on to something. Whatever that change in Cheney is (and I don't pretend to grasp it) there's a connection, I believe, to Armitage--a Republican in the State Department--telling us: "Anybody that knows anything is removed." I think there are two roots to this retreat from empiricism; Bush's is Rovian and Cheney's is Straussian. In 2000 two weeks before the election Bush began to act as if the election was over and assumed the attitude of the president-elect. This is Rove's usual pre-election statergy of appealing to voter's need to back a winner. In this case it worked in a way that he could not have imagined. First of all the media lapped up the election night vignette of Bush family comfortable in their smug certainty that the election was W.'s to lose. This was constantly echoed in the following weeks as news anchors wondered aloud how long the electorate could handle the uncertainty. Then the Supreme Court used that assumption as a premise to award the crown to Bush. That was a triumph of political will that proved to Bush, his administration and his supporters that political success only has to be based on belief. In the following six years they have proved that the success of policy requires more than that. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that both Addington and Libby are Straussians. While supposedly keeping one foot in empirical-based policy decisions Straussians believe that the certainty-starved masses must be fed nuggets of genial and mindless absolutism to ward off the despair of liberal relativism. The fallacy is that the need for certainty is uniform and deep. I think that delusion and Rove's triumph of the will seduced the Cheney Administration into abandoning its empirical based policies in an expression of simple hubris. I am still trying to imagine a corporate press that thinks it could survive by providing its audience with evidence for or against the policies of this administration and not just nuggets of mindless absolutism. You're kidding, right? Posted by: Gary P. Joyce at January 9, 2007 5:09 PM | Permalink Strange interview. So the Garner's planning started in October 2002. The invasion was in March of 2003. So according to the interview, the same month as the invasion, Garner meets with the president and president asks him to "tell him his background" and he asks him "OK, what are you going to do during reconstruction?". You've got to be kidding. The president has been hard selling the war for months, and he needs to ask Garner "what are you going to do during reconstruction" and "what is your background"? So it looks like the president was flying blind about the postwar right up until weeks before the invasion. Good grief. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 5:38 PM | Permalink And he says: But I will tell you that those [turf battles between DOD and State] never affected me personally, and I don't think they affected the team. How does he know that they didn't affect him personally or the team, especially considering how things turned out? This is a strange response to the question. Isn't he even curious why the State Department was cut out? And why did he never ask? I bet it has a lot to do with what Rachel Raphel talked about: "What one needs to understand is that these decisions were ideologically based," the diplomat argued. "They were not based on an analytical, historical understanding. They were based on ideology. You don't counter ideology with logic or experience or analysis very effectively." Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 6:01 PM | Permalink Sorry, Rachel Raphel should be Robin Raphel... Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 6:03 PM | Permalink "That such a discovery—hey, the press can be accurate, people—would be confounding to conservatives is important to know. I give Lowry a lot of credit for saying that." It would be easier to agree if Lowry himself hadn't been one of the children of Agnew angrily denying the obvious for the better part of the past three years. (See: "What Went Right, National Review, April 27, 2005.) It seems to me that Lowry has a pronoun problem: He says "they" when he really meant "we". A common malady on the right, these days. Posted by: Peter Principle at January 9, 2007 6:08 PM | Permalink So the big question for me is why? Jay has blamed irrationality and while that may be partially correct, I have a hard time believing there wasn't any self-acknowledgement that expelling the Tom Warricks of the world might be dangerous. Remember Warrick's an inside guy so it's not like this is just to score political points. It's an approach to policy. If they could recognize the inherent dangerous in such an approach, why plow forward? The only reasons or justifications for such behavior, that I can fathom, include a sense of omnipotence - we aren't disturbed by facts - or a fear of the power of knowledge - once you let in a few facts, you don't get to pick and choose. I don't find either of those justifications particularly convincing. Posted by: mavis beacon at January 9, 2007 6:16 PM | Permalink If they could recognize the inherent dangerous in such an approach, why plow forward? Well, there's this from the Garner interview: But can you give me any insight into why you think there was this resistance to [the State Department's] work? Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 6:24 PM | Permalink Either Garner is terminally incurious or he's hiding something. Neither possibility reflects well on reconstruction... Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2007 6:44 PM | Permalink Nice article on Iraq etc. Starting out with AP and the story that couldn't be corroborated and the ghostly source gives you a patina of concern for the press, but you drop that subject like a white-hot anvil. SURprise. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 9, 2007 9:56 PM | Permalink It seems to me that most of the questions you raise are answered thoroughly, convincingly and sometimes delightfully (in a purely intellectual problem-solving way) in Mark Danner's NYRB piece "The War of the Imagination."http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720. Briefly, Rumsfield would have nixed Warrick, as he would have anyone with an allegience to the State Department, because the DOD plan was for a quick in and out conquest and then a handover to an Iraqi government in exile (Chalabi). Danner has a wonderful comment on Rumsfield's use of the "it came from above" or "it came from outside this building" line: "Such tactics are presumably what mark Rumsfeld as a 'skilled bureaucrati infighter,' the description that has followed him through his career in government like a Homeric epithet." The overall answer to the why question (why would they screw themselves up so badly and end up doing everything counter to their intentions?) that Danner gives is that in the effort to simplify everything and bring the decision making process down to a small group of deciders they ended up making everything more complicated. There's more. A good read. Posted by: wif at January 10, 2007 1:29 AM | Permalink I hope, Jay, that you don't mind that I put a link to Pressthink on my site - after I was needlessly "snarky." There's some valuable stuff going on here that would get missed. I actually do believe there is a bias in media, though not the political one that is bruited about. I believe it has more to do with lack of familiarity, a "strangeness" of story. I don't believe the press has a general agenda regarding firearms, I do believe there is an "otherness" for many in the business. If you were to poll your colleagues as to how many owned or were competent with firearms I think my postulation would be borne out. The firearms thing is only an example that could be applied in other cases. From 40 years of critical news reading I do believe journalism has been harmed by the conservative drumbeat of bias, there tends to be some idea that objective fact or analysis must contain opposing views or that in times of stress it's best not to push Government. That crappy pre-Iraq War intelligence got by an awful lot of people who knew better... Posted by: chuckbutcher at January 10, 2007 1:46 AM | Permalink The right-wing bloggers are like toy poodles, nipping at the toes of the AP over Jamil Hussein. The original story, about an attack against a few Sunnis at a mosque, received very little initial coverage and has been wholly obscured in the "pink mist" of carnage, American and Iraqi, since it was reported. Years ago, organized crime in NYC controlled unions, industries, neighborhoods. The last major Mafia trial here was about not a chain of nightclubs, not a whole nightclub, but the coatroom of some topless joint. The baby don, "Junior" Gotti was reduced to squabbling with the feds over quarters and singles. Posted by: Blynn at January 10, 2007 3:30 AM | Permalink Indeed, wif, that's why the Danner piece is linked to in this post (...the consequences of having only an imaginary plan for the occupation) and my previous one on the subject, Retreat from Empiricism. Danner has some answers. Maybe he's right that the DOD plan was to hand off to Chalabi, but Bush veoted that because deciding who the next government of Iraq would be wasn't "democratic," and since Cheney had killed everything State had done because it didn't assume a quick exit, they went to war with basically no plan at all. Maybe that's how it happened. (It's the only plausible account I know of.) Now does Danner have an answer to... yeah, but how could they do that? that's suicidal... I would say he doesn't, and he would say he doesn't. Also, before all this Cheney would have been classified by most everyone who knew him as a member in good standing of the reality-based community-- in fact he stood out for being sober-minded. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 10, 2007 9:25 AM | Permalink Matt Welch at the LA Times: "At the end of the Nixon administration, you had the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy," Vice President Cheney told reporters in December 2005, in defense of the National Security Agency's possibly illegal wiretapping of American citizens. In January 2002, Cheney told ABC's Cokie Roberts: "I feel an obligation, and I know the president does too … to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years." Notice that at the end of the Nixon Administration you had the peak moment for the modern press in terms of authority and legitimacy. Cheney again: "At the end of the Nixon administration, you had the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy." This ultimately helps to explains rollback. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 10, 2007 9:54 AM | Permalink Because Cheney's experience in the Nixon-Ford-Carter transition led him to believe that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the power, credibility, and authority of the press and that of the executive? (And, generously, that, again, if you carry forward through Carter, leads to weakness in dealings with the Middle East?) Posted by: Richard B. Simon at January 10, 2007 12:55 PM | Permalink Initially, I thought that [the press's] institutional bias toward sensationalism distorted public understanding of the war. But by now the dismal conditions on the ground have caught up with, if not surpassed, the media's bleak outlook. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 10, 2007 1:26 PM | Permalink Funny. If the media outlet reports something that reinforces an outlook. Then its credible. If not. Its biased. Regardless of whether or not what was reported is indeed factual. If you're thinking that statement applies mainly to the right. You are completely divorced from reality. The author of this piece totally avoids something crucial. No one, right or left, would have any argument what so ever regarding press reporting. If the press would spend more time on getting the facts and less on getting the scoop. And why is it a left-right thing when the press gets it wrong? As they did with many of the stories that came out of Katrina, the summer conflict between Israel and Hezbola as well as with stories out of Iraq. Is someone really going to tell me that if the press is wrong, but their error reinforces the Left's narrative on a given subject. That the left should dutifly defend that error and any attempt at correcting it should be portrayed as a right wing smear job or something? Thats pathetic. If you feel your convictions are such that you will defend even lies or errors that reinforce them. Its not an expression of your strong convictions.. its evidence that you really have none This entire post is solely focussed on what motivates the right bloggers to pursue the AP affair. A cheap and lazy endeavor really. Since no one can really know what the motives really are. Any speculation made is going to be read by a receptive audience hungry to have their stereotypes reinforced. Whats most disturbing though is that - as all of it consists of the authors assumptions - the general point being conveyed is in fact more representative of the inner workings of the author. Dont know if that was what the post was supposed to convey. But it left me feeling slimed. Does the AP source as named really exist? Prove it. Did the AP erroneously report the burning of 6 men and 4 mosques? Prove it. If the reporting on the 6 men and the Mosques was in deed in error. Does one not then rightly question the accuracy of previous stories from the AP sourced to the man in question? How many are/were in error as well? What does this say about the accuracy of the reporting by the AP out of Iraq as well as its accuracy elsewhere? Its that simple. Good Lord, one would think that media accuracy would be one place left could agree with right. Guess not. Once again, pathetic. Whats really made me nauseous is the fact the progressive blogosphere has spent so much time on assumptions as to what motivates the righty bloggers to even question the reporting. And almost no time on the questions. This seems a complete reversal of positions here. I thought it was the conservatives that blindly stood by what ever the establishment said was true and progressives were supposed to be the skeptics? Guess thats just another stupid stereo-type. Interesting. M Posted by: Mike at January 10, 2007 11:11 PM | Permalink Welcome aboard, Mike. More from Max Boot, a conservative who supported the President's project in Iraq. His column says something similar to my post. If you wanted to figure out what was happening over the last four years, you would have been infinitely better off paying attention to their writing than to what the president or his top generals were saying. If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq — which the administration defines as a "unified, stable, democratic and secure nation" — it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 10, 2007 11:57 PM | Permalink Just a thought on Cheney and that liberal-biased concept, reality. How many open-heart or bypass procedures has he had? Ever hear of "pump head", a feeling of mental impairment reported by survivors of these procedures and verified by neurologists in 10-25% of cases? It was once thought that the bypass itself was the cause, resulting in tiny clots and ministrokes, but alternative open-heart procedures where the heart is kept beating did not improve the outcome for patients. The culprit may be anaesthesia, the age of the patients, the heart condition itself, a combination, or something else. One also has to consider dementia in any older person, even in their 50's or 60's. Reagan was clearly symptomatic throughout his presidency (his doctors still deny it, meaning the rest of us must be psychic). I'll bet the farm that Zell Miller or his family makes an announcement any day now. Posted by: Blynn at January 11, 2007 3:46 AM | Permalink Ricks speculates about just that in Fiasco, Blynn: that the result of the heart operations could have been a change in personality, which is the first time I had heard that idea. Phillip Carter (ex-military, served in Iraq) at Intell Dump: In conversations with people (especially strangers) since coming home, I'm frequently asked what it's like there, and how the "real Iraq" compares to the "CNN Iraq" or "New York Times version of Iraq." My stock answer goes something like this. The typical daily dispatch from Iraq covers the news of the day ? whether it's some intrigue in the Maliki government, a firefight in Baghdad, or a massive attack somewhere else. It is Baghdad-centric, because many of the reporters are based in Baghdad, and also because that's the main front in the war. To some extent, this daily reporting misses the larger context of Iraq ? the fact that many Iraqis go to work, school, the market, etc., and live their daily lives but for the interruptions of spectacular violence. And to some extent, the media ignores many of the "good deeds" done at the micro-level by U.S. forces, such as the opening of a new school or the delivery of a new generator, because it rates those events as not newsworthy. And so, if there is a difference between the Iraq I knew and the Iraq in the news, it is the complexity and contradiction presented by these multiple stories going on simultaneously. One gets a lot of press; the other one does not. Reporters who are willing to risk their necks to get the story are appreciated by those who know Iraq. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin declares, "MSM credibility, R.I.P." Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 11, 2007 8:15 AM | Permalink Some facts about top decision makers from a study by a professor at NYU: What I find interesting is that this behavior is typical of many with the power to decide... it's neither right or left, for or not-for-profit. I've seen it in science, academia, big and small companies. I think your post says it happens in government too. Sounds right to me. Have you seen it in journalism? I've seen it in the business side of the media. Posted by: laurence haughton at January 11, 2007 1:27 PM | Permalink How about O'Neil's story about Brandeis Briefs not being used in the White House? A friend of mine was telling me about how pilots, as they're in the process of taking off and landing, have a formal process where the copilot "challenges" them on anything that they might have forgotten or not noticed. The pilot can't tell his subordinate "quiet, you're being annoying," because there's a formal process and all benefit from it. In military history, this sort of thing dates back to the Greek hoplites, who were the first to be included in the decisionmaking around fighting. People of lower rank could challenge people of higher rank and be heard. This pooled everyone's brainpower and experience, but also made for a more coherent team, because everyone felt like they had a stake in the outcome. It made for a formidable fighting force that was hard to match in the ancient world. (I've heard some historians describe this as part of how representative democracy came about.) But, what happens if you inject the Paranoid Style (of Politics or News) into this mix? There's a good chance that these kinds of reality-based "challenges" are going to get dumped... And it seems like there was plenty of ideological paranoia in American occupied Iraq, like with dismissing Tom Warrick; or the ideological litmus tests superceding placing officials with the right experience; or the 22-24 year olds given jobs way over their head, just because they passed their resumes to the Heritage think tank--just to name a few. The list goes on. One of my favorites is Ricks' quote from Keith Mines, who complained to the CPA that "Employment is a key issue. We need more Maslow and less Friedman." This points to a basic absurdity. If you have masses of people who are scrapping just to survive on a basic level, getting them to all read Ayn Rand and be entrepreneurs is, um, a ways down the road. Right off the bat, it's a no-brainer that you just want people to get fed, and get them friendly with the US cause. But in the case of an ideologue, there's a good chance that this sort of "challenge" from Kieth Mines is liable to fall on deaf ears. A case where this lesson was writ large was the dismissal of the state department. If you don't have the State Department participating in the process, just the Pentagon, that's not good. Because they're the ones who are going to be able to tell the military / Pentagon the cases where "you can't knit a sweater with a blow torch"--where the military role ends and the political one begins. (Or maybe that was what State told the Pentagon was told earlier, which was why Tom Warrick was sidelined and why Robin Raphel spoke out the way she did...) And if this is how things went, the movement conservative bloggers, Newscorp, etc. seem to mirror this whole situation. If, in the paranoid style of politics/news, you discount valid "challenges", eventually, your paranoia is going to serve to insulate you from the facts on the ground. (And then of course, there are some who blame the "liberal media" even for this, which reminds me of a Tom Tomorrow Cartoon I saw a while back : http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Photos/2005/11/america-a_brief_parable.jpg .) Posted by: JJWFromME at January 11, 2007 2:55 PM | Permalink Michelle Malkin is a reporter risking her neck in Iraq at this very moment ...so you can drop your sanctimonious posturing, Jay. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at January 11, 2007 9:55 PM | Permalink The National Academy of Sciences asks the White House OMB to drop its reality reassessment program: The Bush administration yesterday withdrew a proposal to change the way federal agencies assess environmental hazards, health threats and other risks, after an expert panel declared that it was so scientifically flawed that it "could not be rescued." Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2007 8:16 AM | Permalink And Exxon says it has stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute's disinformation campaign to discredit climate science. That would be the disinformation campaign that "conservatives" argue does not exist. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at January 12, 2007 11:50 AM | Permalink Once again, you're long on speculation concerning motives, and short on facts. One quick example: It appears, in this case, that the bloggers were right - Captain Jamil Hussein does not exist, and never did. There WAS a cop who seems to have been a source of some kind, but his name is not Captain Hussein. There is also no evidence that the four mosques that got reported burned down (the copy was later furtively amended to read that only one was burned) actually got burned down. All four mosques are still extant, only one suffered any burn damage at all, and that was minor. The fact that they haven't burned down is the elephant in the room, and is what started the whole search for Captain Hussein. IF the story wasn't such obvious crap to begin with, no one would have bothered looking for him in the first place. Now, if the AP wants to get haughty about their source actually existing, and going so far as naming him Jamail Gholaim Hussein, then it's not too much to ask to expect that Jamail Gholaim Hussein actually exists. But he does not, and the man that the AP insists was the source (though he's no one by the name the AP's Kathleen Connelly insisted he was.) Leaps to large conclusions from thin and miserable facts are routine in the established record of how it happened. Unfortunately, leaps to large conclusions from thin and miserable facts have become the PressThink trademark. It's increasingly apparent that this crowd is more interested in speculating on Cheney's dementia without a shred of supporting evidence (other than a policy they disagree with) than dealing with the Five W's. As the music teacher said in the movie "Fame," "That's not music, Martelli. That's masturbation." You wanna deal with the facts? Great. Deal with the facts. Press Think, alas, has become all about ignoring the facts, or fixing them around the Grand PT narrative: "Cheney's senile and Bush is delusional." Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2007 5:03 PM | Permalink Once again, you're long on speculation concerning motives, and short on facts. We've got a big book of facts that everyone from John McCain to Max Boot is reading. In fact, we've got several of them. So don't listen to me speculate. Just read. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2007 6:33 PM | Permalink Shorter Jason: so's your mother! This part was added to the Huff Post version, which is slightly revised from this one. Situation Grave and Deteriorating for the Agnewocracy. This week in the LA Times, Max Boot, a conservative columnist who supported the invasion of Iraq, echoed what Lowry said. The press for all its fall downs and faults has been the better reality check in Iraq-- better than the White House, better than the military and its press operation, better than the rightosphere itself. And the trouble is that it's been a better guide to what was actually happening for liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves. It's true that the press covers explosions better than it covers conditions. Blow-ups get noticed, mission creep and steady progress do not. There's distortion in that. And a small distortion can over time produce a large effect. "Initially," wrote Boot. "I thought that this institutional bias toward sensationalism distorted public understanding of the war. But by now the dismal conditions on the ground have caught up with, if not surpassed, the media's bleak outlook." Initially... but then I realized. The Agnewocracy dreads that second thought, and for good reason. Boot explains: Whatever the shortcomings of some reporting, there has been a lot of first-rate coverage by a heroic corps of correspondents that has persevered in the face of terrible danger. (At least 109 journalists have been killed and many others wounded or kidnapped, making this the deadliest conflict on record for the Fourth Estate.) I am thinking of reporters such as John Burns, Dexter Filkins and Michael Gordon of the New York Times; Greg Jaffe and Michael Philips of the Wall Street Journal; Tom Ricks of the Washington Post; Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times and former Times reporter John Daniszewski; Sean Naylor of Army Times; Bing West and Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly; and George Packer of the New Yorker. They've risked their necks to get the truth -- and not, as Rumsfeld suggested, by flying over Iraq. Notice that you're infinitely better off with the press if you wanted to figure out what was actually happening. But what if you didn't want it figured out because it would hamper your freedom of action? Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 12, 2007 7:17 PM | Permalink Well, as I've argued before: Fiasco's a crock. But garbage in, garbage out. I've got a big book of facts to trot out, too. But if all you can do is name your favorite authors whose assumptions jibe with yours (Waas, Ricks, Hersh, et. al.) rather than deal intelligently and concretely with the facts themselves, and are prepared to defend the postulates underlying their arguments and yours on their own merits, then you're just spinning your wheels in an exercise in rhetoric, not in analysis. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2007 7:32 PM | Permalink At a not-for-quotation pre-speech briefing on Jan. 10, George W. Bush and his top national security aides unnerved network anchors and other senior news executives with suggestions that a major confrontation with Iran is looming... You would think all the prewar intelligence problems would have made more of an impression on him. Again, the idea seems more important than the reality. Reality is not a priority and takes a back seat. Posted by: JJWFromME at January 12, 2007 8:11 PM | Permalink re: "Shorter Jason: so's your mother!" *lol* Jay: there is a lot of life in this place! "But by now the dismal conditions on the ground have caught up with, if not surpassed, the media's bleak outlook." - Max Boot Well, no shit, Max. Ain't it a bitch when reality (2006) corresponds with reporting (2003, 2004, 2005) ? That's the real brain pain the rightwingnuts are dealing with -- and it's gonna take more than a couple of Tylenol PM's to ease the distress. Great post, Jay. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 12, 2007 10:40 PM | Permalink George W. Bush and his top national security aides unnerved network anchors and other senior news executives with suggestions that a major confrontation with Iran is looming... Holy crap...are these senior news executives really so stupid that they haven't figured that out yet without the President pointing out the obvious? Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2007 11:07 PM | Permalink U.S. weapons inspectors concluded in 2004 that Hussein had long ago abandoned his nuclear weapons program. You know, it's just one lie after another. That was NOT the conclusion of the inspectors. They concluded that no further significant progress on the nuclear program was made under the sanctions, which is a very different matter. Indeed, the conclusion of the weapons inspectors - specifically Charles Duelfer's 2004 Iraq Survey Group, was very much the opposite of how your knucklehead source characterized it. Far from concluding that Saddam had "abandoned" his nuclear ambitions, Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group concluded the following (verbatim from the report):
Duelfer found that Saddam's ability to pursue nuclear weapons decayed during the 1990s, but goes on to write the following: Initially, Saddam chose to conceal his nuclear program in its entirety, as he did with Iraq's BW [Biological Warfare] program. Aggressive UN inspections after Desert Storm forced Saddam to admit the existence of the program and destroy or surrender components of the program. These are not the actions of a man who had "abandoned" the goal of obtaining nuclear weapons. Of course, the author of the crap you're reading didn't bother to concern himself with what Duelfer actually said. More from the ISG report: The ISG found a limited number of post-1995 activities that would have aided the reconstitution of a nuclear program once sanctions were lifted. That is the reality. These were the conclusions of the ISG in 2004, in so many words. Apparently, reality isn't important to the people you've been reading, who can't be bothered to actually READ what's in the primary documents. Once again, garbage in, garbage out. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 12, 2007 11:51 PM | Permalink Discredited sources left in because they were critical to a faltering case— also routine. Discredited sources like Joe Wilson? Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 13, 2007 12:02 AM | Permalink Jason explains what he is doing here. Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 13, 2007 2:10 AM | Permalink Ain't it a bitch when reality (2006) corresponds with reporting (2003, 2004, 2005) ? The reality of 2006 does not authenticate the reportage of 2003. Only the reality of 2003 can authenticate the reality of 2003, and journalists do not yet have a monopoly on information about that reality. That said, 2003 was different. Also bad, but different. One of the things I find most suspicious (uh oh, wingnut alert) about the conventional wisdom of the "IT'S ALL ONE UNDIFFERENTIATED CALAMITY AFTER ANOTHER IN AN ORGY OF BUSH FAILURE" view is its remarkable consistency. I read history books, and it sure appears that all wars ebb and flow, that their character changes over time and that very rarely is there nothing but failure on one side. It's not necessary to attack the content of the material the media reports to question the veracity of the narrative it attaches to it. Reporters are good at reporting things.. they are not necessarily subject matter experts, and generally do not have the level of certainty about either the specific details or the big picture that their reportage implies. It's part of the nature of the beast, but it does make me rather uncomfortable when those who do not have relevant expertise imagine themselves to be experts. The consistency of their narrative seems to be significantly detached from underlying facts. For example, I've seen AP reports out of Iraq whose headline described Baghdad as being "rocked" by bomb blasts after Saddam was sentenced. If you read into the article, however, the "bomb blasts" were in fact a single report of 6 mortar shells which landed in a residential neighborhood with no reported injuries. This was the daily summary of Iraqi violence, and all it had for a city of 7 million was A SINGLE MORTAR ATTACK? 6 mortars could be fired by a small team with a mortar truck in a few minutes. They are militarily trivial, but Iraq is swimming in them. Would you get the sense of triviality from the headline 'Baghdad "rocked" by bomb blasts'? No, you'd think some real serious heavy stuff was going down.. but in fact the only violence to report was a single mortar attack! When every violent attack is described in the same tone and with the same level of alarm -- even ones with scant evidence, like the burning six -- how can the public understand the actual changes on the ground? =darwin Yeah, I have to explain what I'm doing to Countercolumn readers, because when I do post on PressThink, a number of them always write me and ask why I bother. The point is not to try to convert Rosen or Lovelady or Simon or anyone else. The point is not to let questionable assumptions (or false ones, such as the assertion that the ISG concluded that Saddam had "abandoned" his nuclear program) pass unchallenged. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 13, 2007 9:50 AM | Permalink I find the debate here entertaining. I don't buy Jason's assertion that Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq is a crock, as his post on it requires misreading the introduction into a strawman that he then proceeds to beat up, and then it ignores the entire rest of the book. Sort of judging a book by its cover. However, his continued presentation of misrepresentations and ignored facts by print articles, and then the failure to recognize/concede these points and arguments discredits those who are arguing against Jason. I see a lot more preaching to the choir here rather than honest debate. Lastly, I find it interesting that for all the fuss made over Warrick here, that none of the journalists posting here have delved into the primary source material to add depth to their argument, like Jason has done with the ISG (Duelfer) report. I understand that one of the points being made is how DoD ignored State in that interagency pissing contest, but it is then left to the readers' imagination on this board as to what the impact of this decision was. Was the report a silver bullet left unfired? Was it a mixed bag? It is simply not enough to state that they interagency process was broke, but to demonstrate the extent of the failure, you must show how things would have been different. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/index.htm Posted by: Shek at January 13, 2007 9:54 AM | Permalink "They believe in their Red State bones that the press is biased against them." Yeah. Tony Blair's a real "red stater, huh?" "[Islamic terrorists] have realised two things: the power of terrorism to cause chaos, hinder and displace political progress especially through suicide missions; and the reluctance of Western opinion to countenance long campaigns, especially when the account it receives is via a modern media driven by the impact of pictures. "They now know that if a suicide bomber kills 100 completely innocent people in Baghdad, in defiance of the wishes of the majority of Iraqis who voted for a non-sectarian government, then the image presented to a Western public is as likely to be, more likely to be, one of a failed Western policy, not another outrage against democracy." It's kinda hard to dismiss the argument as the inane rantings of the toothless unwashed in red-state flyover country when the head of the Labor party in the United Kingdom has come to the same conclusion, at least w/r/t coverage of Iraq. Do you think that Tories think they get a fair shake, or that the media is too biased to the right? No. Wartime coverage in the UK is to the dovish side of both. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 13, 2007 10:04 AM | Permalink The following passage is relevant. It's from my post on the Nick Berg beheading video (May 2004) and it tries to draw some important distinctions, as well as acknowledge that there are political implications in everything the press does: It is a fact of life that there are political implications in everything the news media does when handling a big national story-- including the images that are shown and not shown to us. Writing in USA Today on May 11, the day the Berg video surfaced, Walter Shapiro speculated: "This atrocity is almost certain to inflame American public sentiment, and presumably will strengthen the position of those calling for an-eye-for-an-eye vengeance in Iraq." |
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