This NYT article on Iraq today is a good example of why it's so frustrating to try to follow news on Iraq through corporate media. Michael Gordon, who does some really good stuff on Iraq and often seems to fully understand the intricacies of the conflict, delivers up what reads like the stenography for which reporters are so often criticized by experts in various fields. In this case, the Bush administration is once again accusing Iran of causing problems in Iraq, this time by reportedly bringing in Hezbollah (an Arab, Lebanon-based Shia group formed to fight Israel and now a significant political and military force in Lebanon) officials to train Iraqi militia members. This is part of a continuing story in which the US blames problems in Iraq on nefarious neighbors, but anything is possible, so it's worth looking at the details of the report.
Or at least it would be if there *were any details* in the report. Most critically, it's important to note that there are many militias in Iraq. There's a (US-supported) Sunni militia in western Iraq (Anbar province), and in addition to several smaller tribal and political party-affiliated militias, the two major Shia political groups, ISCI and Sadrists, both have armed elements (the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Militia, respectively). So one would think an important detail of the story would be . . . which militia we're accusing Iran of training? Especially because the US has essentially come out in support of ISCI and its Badr Corps, as they are the main element keeping Prime Minister Maliki in power. Could the administration flacks be so cynical as to accuse Iran of training a "militia" that we tacitly support, and that is closely allied with our good buddy Maliki?
I suppose it's possible that the militia in question is the Mahdi Militia, but with Iran supposedly backing away from support of Sadrists, that seems less likely, and since the US opposes Mahdi so strongly, why not just say so if that's the case? The whole thing is very strange, and it's opaque to an extent that it's very suspicious.
Oh I am shocked. 1000000% shocked and then some. Just ask an Aussie about how great the media is now that he owns almost all of it down there. Lots of open exchanges of ideas on both sides...the right and the far right. For all of the theater that the Bancroft family delivered before selling they now look either like frauds of just plain stupid. Either works fine.
Four months after buying the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has been accused by a special independent committee of breaking "the letter and the spirit" of an agreement to protect editorial integrity.
A five-strong committee established as a condition of the Bancroft family's $5bn (£2.5bn) sale of the paper's Dow Jones parent company to Murdoch has complained that it was kept in the dark over the resignation of the Journal's top editor.
Committee members say they were not told until after the event about the controversial resignation last week of the managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, which has prompted fevered rumours of a rift over the direction of the paper.
Just a simple coincidence, no doubt. After all, Bush did look into his heart and I think we all know Bush's judgment is infallible.
Moskovsky Korrespondent, the newspaper that first reported rumours of a marriage between Vladimir Putin and Alina Kabaeva, a 24-year-old gymnast, has closed, shortly after the President told journalists it was unacceptable to pry into his private life with "snotty noses and erotic fantasies".
Nothing captures the Olympic spirit like controlling the press. Fortunately the American media is familiar with this routine, having given up their authority and independence to the Bush administration after 9/11 so this will be an easy process for them. Nobody, but nobody can provide government boot-licking like the US media. I'm smelling a few touching human interest stories about Hu Jintao and his love of puppy dogs and injured kittens. There is no low low enough for the American media when money is involved. Hooray for freedom and democracy! Hooray for GE, Nike and Coke!
Hillary has lost her inevitability, her come-back status, and now the entire media narrative. That first sentence of the Reuters story is devastating. The media finally gets it. The race is over. Hillary is simply causing as much damage as possible before the inevitable.
Michael O'Hanlon, surge shill and general embarrassment to foreign policy professionals everywhere, outdoes himself in the pages of the New York Times (William Kristol! David Brooks! Mike O'Hanlon! Your favorites from the "liberal" New York Times!) with his conclusions-without-evidence op-ed about how Iraq's political situation is doing just fine
I'd say more, but my colleague Ilan Goldenberg gets it exactly right. Including:
Here’s the best thing about this. There is no way to refute it because his scoring isn’t up anywhere. It’s not in the Iraq Index and the closest thing he has is an A, B, C grading system from a month and a half ago. So, five out of eleven it is because that’s what Mike O’Hanlon tells me it is.
Keep digging. Actually, this is quite interesting since the author of the piece in question, and the author of that quote, is a woman. Can a woman be sexist against other women? As a guy, I'm curious what the women out there think. (Background on this issue here.)
NYT has reports some puzzling analysis on Iraq from Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former second-in-command of US forces in there. Odierno has been relatively straightforward on a number of issues in recent years, and he correctly notes that political and economic progress will be required for any lasting improvement of the situation in Iraq. The nominee to be the Army's next vice chief of staff, Odierno also mentioned the importance of provincial elections and encouragingly cited literacy and vocational programs as key to establishing a functional society.
He also, however, says two things that stunned me -- one which would be shocking if true, and another that I find extraordinarily difficult to believe. The article says, "About half of the attacks carried out by militants are by Shiite groups, he said. The rest are primarily orchestrated by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia". For years, the vast majority of attacks in Iraq have been by the domestic (non-AQI) Sunni insurgency, especially in the west (Anbar) and in Baghdad -- so if what he says is true, then the Sunni insurgency is over, and there is nobody left for us to fight, especially given all the talk of "al Qaeda in Iraq" being routed by indigenous Sunnis.
The claim about Shia groups plays into the second confounding claim, which is that Shia groups are responsible for half the attacks and, "The general said that Iran continues to train and finance Shiite extremists in Iraq and that Iran’s goal is to ensure that the Iraqi state remains too weak to challenge Iran’s increasing power." But . . . what Shia extremists?? The two major Shia armed groups, Sadr's Mahdi Militia and ISCI's Badr Corps, are the armed wings of the two most significant Shia political parties, both of which are full participants in the government. They could hardly be accused of working to weaken the government, and I can't think of any other groups Iran would be working with to undermine Iraq, especially considering Iran's longtime association with ISCI.
Unfortunately, the Times doesn't appear to have asked the two natural follow-up questions: "So is the Sunni domestic insurgency over?" and "Which Shia groups are working with Iran to undermine the government?" It's surprising, because reporter Michael Gordon knows these issues very well; I'd love to know what Odierno would say in response. Instead, the reader is left thinking that these two bombshells are nothing particularly special. Very weird.
Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee and party standard-bearer, recently suggested that if the US withdraws troops from Iraq, al Qaida would literally take over the country: "[I]f we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn't be establishing a base, they'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen . . . I will not surrender to al-Qaida." This is, of course, completely ridiculous, and Joe Klein rightly calls out McCain, saying:
They'd be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi'ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi'ites -- the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians) -- would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren't too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either.
That's all absolutely right. Joe then goes on to say, though, "The sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows the complexities of the world, and the region. But I suspect he's overplaying his Iraq hand in order to win favor with the wingnuts in his party."
That may be true. But it also may very well be true that McCain doesn't know any better. I don't know the Senator, and can't guess at his inner knowledge of Middle East political and religious intricacies, but considering his evident lack of intellectual curiosity on the economy, health care, science, and a whole host of other issues, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that he has an understanding of the *military* but not any sophisticated *Middle East foreign policy* knowledge. This isn't a knock on Joe -- he was the only major media figure I saw to make the point that McCain is wrong, but if McCain says this is what he thinks, I'm sort of inclined to take him at his word. And if Mike Huckabee -- or, of course, a Democrat -- were to demonstrate such a lack of basic knowledge, it would be viewed as a huge gaffe. Because, y'know, it is.
My friend and colleague Michael Signer had a great WaPo op-ed this weekend, fresh off a ten month stint as a senior foreign policy advisor to the Edwards campaign, about the dearth of media coverage on foreign affairs in the primaries. Signer rightly notes that the meaty foreign policy discussions are far more often carried out on blogs than in newspapers, and with a few notable exceptions, foreign policy issues have never really gained traction in either primary. This is especially weird considering the president has far more unilateral power on foreign policy than domestic issues, which are hugely shaped by Congress. It's partly due to general intra-party agreement on foreign policy -- obviously the general will feature much stronger disagreement about, say, Iraq -- but also partly because of media failures.
It's also, though, partly the fault of campaigns, or at least some Democratic foreign policy professionals who continue to see politics as icky or beneath them. Matt Stoller elaborates:
Look, if you want foreign policy to become a political issue, you have to make it a political issue. That's an organizing problem. I didn't see any attacks from any Democratic candidates against each other on North Korea or Russia, any attempts to draw distinctions, though I saw a lot of high-minded 'major serious policy addresses'. Of course those are going to be discussed on elite foreign policy focused blogs and nowhere else. If you want to get into the fray, you have to get in the fray.
And it's true: my favorite way to talk about foreign policy is to chat in a wonky way with other wonks. But I do things like write for this blog and write a book and attend YearlyKos because there's huge value in making these issues accessible and, dare I say, interesting to people who aren't professionals. So Signer rightly elaborates on the media aspect of the problem, and the best way to influence that -- rather than simply hoping the media does a better job all on its own -- is to connect the policy with the political. It's an effort that is, I should say, *vastly* improved from two or four years ago, with excellent groups popping up to do it, but there's always more room for us to get better, and it's vital that we do.
Basically just a degree away from my explanation of why Bhutto has attracted such a media crush -- shorter version: she was Westernized, female, and attractive -- is this darkly funny parody piece by Tim Noah. Since apparently every pundit east of the Mississippi knew her from Harvard, Oxford, or a cocktail party, we've been subjected to a never-ending barrage of Bhutto nostalgia pieces, and this is (farcically) an addition to the genre.
In all seriousness, though, it really does point to a serious problem in foreign policy coverage and thinking. From the American perspective, generally speaking, analysis of foreign leaders too often goes something like this: Speaks English? Sophisticated. Speaks language of country of origin? Backwater. Went to an Ivy League school? Moderate. Educated anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere? Extremist. Appreciates single malt? A partner for peace. Eschews the party circuit? Untrustworthy.
And through these heuristics, you get things like people predicting electoral victories of, for example, Iraq's Allawi and Chalabi the day before Sadr and Hakim sweep the polls. It's very frustrating.
Yesterday I resolved to stop reading stupid WaPo op-eds. That lasted about eight hours, thanks to the . . . let's just say "inimitable" . . . Richard Cohen. He starts out with a huge lie, saying that John Edwards fibbed about the cost of his haircut (whaaa???), which is particularly ironic because the rest of the column is about the problem of lies in politics. It looks like he just threw it in there to have another Democrat along with the subsequent list of (real, actual) Republican lies, which then segues to an entire column about how one Obama misstatement has basically ruined Obama for him. Richard Cohen is very disappointed in you, Barack! Even though it doesn't always bother him when politicians lie. But this time it really did. Following so far? More fun after the jump.
The real entertainment is the following: after describing Obama's statement that there are more young black men in prison than in college as incorrect (which it is [UPDATE: apparently the statement would be true stated either as 1. All black men or 2. All young black men in prison *and on parole or probation*]), he says this: "Ought to be true is not the same as true." Ought? Ought?? This ought to be true? Either Cohen doesn't know what "ought" means, or he has some profoundly weird ideas about what the state of the world should be.
And lest you think this is a rhetorical goof, he follows it up with a truly wankerrific list of further "oughts" -- "After all, it ought to be true that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It ought to be true that he had ties with Osama bin Laden. It ought to be true that aluminum tubes were intended for a nuclear weapons program, and it ought to be true, really, that none of this mattered since what mattered most of all was a larger truth: Hussein had to go and the Middle East had to be urban-renewed for the sake of democracy." Richard Cohen is obviously a very serious person. "Urban-renewed," that's what we're doing in the Middle East. Uh huh.
The finishing touch is when he says that John McCain lies, but that's okay because Cohen knows McCain's character and McCain has a lot of experience. I kid you not -- lying is okay if you have experience and good character, according to the piece. But Obama doesn't have any experience and so his lies mean he's a bad person. Or something.
And just so you know, Richard Cohen is a journalism professor at Columbia. Good times!
I was talking with a friend this weekend about the Bhutto situation. He knows a little about foreign policy, though it's neither his vocation nor his avocation, and he asked, roughly, This isn't going to have any effect on the primaries, right? Probably not. And it ruins our Pakistan policy, but that policy was terrible to begin with? Right. Pakistan isn't going to fall apart? No. It's not going to affect the fact that Pakistan and Afghanistan are disasters when it comes to counter-terror? Might make it a little worse, but essentially that's accurate. So why, he asked, why the wall-to-wall coverage and focus? The answer after the jump . . .
It's primarily because Bhutto hits the trifecta for media attention paid to a foreigner: Westernized (attended Harvard, no less), attractive (was once named one of People's 50 most beautiful), and female (self-evident). The media has a habit of focusing on Westernized, charming foreign leaders -- and the US has a habit of backing them despite evidence that maybe we shouldn't -- and especially so when the subject is telegenic. Now, I'm not one to complain about media focus on foreign affairs, not *at all*; still, it's worth noting the particular reasons and inclinations behind this kind of media crush. It's interesting that now there's some real coverage of the events in Pakistan, beyond just Bhutto herself, and that's great -- though the actual situation apparently continues to deteriorate.
If US foreign policy for a particular country or topic depends on an *individual* rather than a system or structure or process, odds are it's a crummy policy. The very idea that our foreign policy for Pakistan could be utterly destroyed by the death of a single person, however tragically and unexpectedly, shows you how bad a policy it was in the first place.
Opening up the cable TV industry was a great move, but media consolidation? Look at how well consolidation in the banking and telecom industry has worked. If you want to see how well media consolidation works, look at the path the US media is already on or check out Australia, where Rupert Murdoch dominates the media with very few exceptions. Is that what we want to see in the US? Wasn't the Cold War supposed to be about issues like this? Looks like the Soviet Union won.
What ever happened to the spirit of competition that used to be important in America?
What bold coverage from CNN, who must have run out of "Mrs. Smith's cat 'Mittens' rescued from tree, live from Elwood City" stories. Sounds like there's nothing to report about Iraq or Afghanistan because it's all going so well. With the US economy booming, hell, what else can they run as the headline story other than a ticket scandal for some bubblegum performer? Brought to you by the proud sponsors of the why America must defend itself and invade Iraq, how we're winning the war in Iraq, why the surge is working despite Democrats that hate America, why we need to nuke Iran and why global warming is a fraud. Where would America be without CNN?
And an interesting comparison between the the paths of Bush and Gore since 2000 from the Post. What a different country and better place the US would have been with a Gore administration. The Republicans are so full of sour grapes, obviously touchy about the massive failures and lies that will define the GOP for years to come. Gore was so right about so many things and that's something the GOP or the Supreme Court can never take away.
What other good articles is everyone seeing out there from around the world?
Yglesias reminds me that I've been meaning to write about "The Kingdom," a movie starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman, and Jennifer Garner (!) about the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. I should disclose that in general I'm a pretty terrible critic because, well, I love movies and am generally entertained by most I see to at least some extent. That said, "The Kingdom" far exceeded my expectations. I figured it would be a fun shoot-em-up, with some embarrassingly jingoistic overtones and obvious cultural screwups.
To my pleasant surprise, the characters (both US and Saudi) were generally understated and realistic, and the movie did a remarkably good job with the cultural stuff. Matt says was he baffled by the end's "ideological swerve," but I really never got the sense that this was a rah-rah presentation at any point. Yes, there was the familiar tale of ground-level people fighting against a pernicious bureaucracy (which, I should say, resonates with me significantly because of my experience at DIA), but I definitely didn't feel like there was a hard power fetish going on.
If anything, the film did a great job with the very real political and bureaucratic impediments to taking action in certain types of international arenas. Foxx's character does some deft maneuvering to get a small investigative team into Saudi Arabia following an attack on an American (civilian) compound, at which point the team immediately comes face to face with . . . more political and bureaucratic impediments. In a rah-rah movie, the characters would force/will/shoot their way through the barriers; in "The Kingdom," they think and manipulate through what they can, and the rest . . . just stay barriers.
The one big problem -- which is endemic to this kind of movie, and frankly I don't think it could have been done any other way, but it's still requires suspension of disbelief -- is that the team of four (plus one or two Saudi allies) become a crack commando team when they come under fire. But even this -- and to a much greater degree, the impact and success of a team of four with regard to the investigation -- reflects the value of good training. The movie presents the Saudi investigation as essentially a CYA operation, whereas the Americans (and, again, a few local allies) want to actually *solve* the case. This is, I think, an entirely plausible rendering of a situation like this, as is the effort by sniveling bureaucrats to cut short the investigation after some minimal, threshold successes (to avoid any further problems).
As for the end, I thought it was excellent. Without giving too much away, it reflected not Victory and Triumph by the Americans, but a far more realistic observation about the intractable nature of these conflicts and problems. That kind of ending in a major Hollywood blockbuster makes me wonder if the US may really be coming around, recognizing that these issues aren't just a matter of forcing conflict and asserting ourselves at all costs. Maybe even that -- and this will be shocking, I know -- we're doing counterproductive things ostensibly in service of our security.
That thought got another little bump as I walked out of the theater and saw a poster for a movie titled, "Rendition," with the tag line, "What if someone you love . . . just disappeared?" Maybe we're really starting to turn the corner with this stuff. One can hope.
I really, really wanted to avoid jumping on the Brooks-hating bandwagon this week -- not because it's not deserved, but just on a don't-feed-the-trolls theory. Plus, others have done a great job of eviscerating what was a truly stupid column about how Hillary's lead in the polls demonstrates that Dems are becoming more hawkish. See the links for a full shredding of this idea (especially, as always, Glenn's over at Salon).
But there is something that for some reason hasn't gotten mentioned, as least not that I've seen: Many, many Democrats who support Hillary erroneously think she's planning to remove all troops from Iraq within nine months.
Hillary's in the lead not *due to* her position on Iraq, but rather, one could persuasively argue based on this polling, because people are *projecting upon her a position she does not hold* (note to Mr. Brooks: polls are where opinions are determined empirically, which I admit is less efficient than just deciding everybody agrees with you, but almost certainly more accurate in the end).
Now, admittedly I'm somewhat less concerned with the evasion about final numbers than are others, and I think reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate pace of withdrawal (at least between "soon" and "really really soon"). But a much more interesting -- and intellectually honest -- column could have been about whether her support would be where it is if people fully understood her position. Instead, we get David Brooks on how everybody agrees with David Brooks.
The New York Times does a piece on how -- despite right-wing hyperventilation -- Ahmadinejad isn't really that important. Not in his own country, and not in the grand scheme of international relations, except for how we keep supporting him by giving him too much attention and being belligerent.
Political analysts [in Iran] say they are surprised at the degree to which the West focuses on their president, saying that it reflects a general misunderstanding of their system.
Unlike in the United States, in Iran the president is not the head of state nor the commander in chief. That status is held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, whose role combines civil and religious authority. At the moment, this president’s power comes from two sources, they say: the unqualified support of the supreme leader, and the international condemnation he manages to generate when he speaks up.
"The United States pays too much attention to Ahmadinejad," said an Iranian political scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. "He is not that consequential."
