Shoutingatmytv.com

Disgusting and Frightening

I almost missed this must read article in yesterday's NY Times. It details a propaganda operation run out of the Pentagon to sell the war in Iraq to the American people, involving the "military analysts" we see on television all the time. The article notes a preponderance of these "analysts" who worked for Fox News, but there are many who work for all the other main news outlets as well, both broadcast and print.

Those "analysts", it turns out, are mostly lobbyists for military contractors with a strong vested interest in toeing the administration and the Pentagon's line in their "analysis" of what's been going on in Iraq, from the lead up to the war, right through the present day. The article also reports details from contemporary e-mails (secured through FOIA requests) that make it clear that the Pentagon worked that vested interest very specifically and very consciously, in an organized program that involved special access, tailored "fact-finding" trips, regular conference calls, and overt appeals to the "analysts" in question to act as administration "surrogates" in getting the "good news" about Iraq out to the public.

Not only has the professional judgment of the Pentagon been subverted in the same way that the Justice Department has by this administration and its water carriers, but in this case, it has managed to co-opt and dramatically twist coverage of the war by supposedly independent media sources, who appear to have completely failed to recognize or even look for the conflicts of interest at the heart of the cadre of "analysts" giving the "authoritative analysis" (astonishingly, considering their influence, the article notes that these people don't have the same rules about disclosing conflicts that reporters do).

It's a thoroughgoing disgrace, and I'm at a loss to describe the magnitude of the deception it involves. Read the article.

John Brady Kiesling

This is an old letter now, and many of its observations are unsurprising to many of us. When it was originally published in the NYT, though, its viewpoint was neither old nor commonly understood. It's worth preserving as a testament to a diplomat who understood before many of us that sacrificing our honor on the altar of our fear was a bad bargain, as well as being cowardly and wrong.

Kiesling is (after spending a year as a visiting lecturer at Princeton) still living in Athens, and doing occasional lectures. He's written a book called Diplomacy Lessons that is just coming out in paperback. If you want to keep a copy of that resignation letter, which should be added to the collection of important American documents, buy it. Whether you do so or not, let's hope he gets some wider recognition soon for taking an honorable stand at a time when it would cost him dearly, as well as making accurate predictions about the dangers of replacing diplomacy with cowardly bluster. Read the letter. It's an eye-opener, and it's too bad it was ignored when it was written.

Ahmadinejad

Rick Perlstein has a great post up today about our favorite bogey man of the moment, and the hysterical reaction to his visit. Check out Bed Wetter Nation.

Blackwater

"I think the military culture fully accepts these days, rightly or wrongly, that we can't go to war anymore without these contractors," said one Iraq war veteran. "I do not expect calls for action from within the structure and have heard none. If action comes, it will be from Capitol Hill or pressure brought by the press."

The quote is from this article by Sudarsan Raghavan and Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post about the Blackwater shootings, which also quotes a senior military official in Baghdad as saying that the incident could be worse for the US than Abu Ghraib (that's certainly going some!).

I wish I understood why that is so fully accepted in the military culture. Mercenaries are bad business as a matter of principle, and while many may have served honorably, I know of no instance in which their use has ever been a credit to the country that employed them. Their rules of engagement in Iraq are hazy, except that whatever they do, they have blanket immunity from the CPA that is still in force and being defended by the State Department in an internecine squabble with the DOD (and of course, the Iraqi government, such as it is). They continue to do damage to the US's image in Iraq, at a time when we are spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives ostensibly trying to stabilize a civil war among factions whose only common trait is that they have all come to hate their occupiers. The military commanders on the ground in Iraq think so little of them that they wouldn't take control over them if it were offered (which it has not been). Do we really need another heavily armed militia force in Iraq, even if its soldiers do speak English?

This is a dangerous issue in the long term, as well as an immediate crisis in Iraq (where we hardly needed another one). Jeremy Scahill's book, Blackwater, tells a story of the firm's history, background, and performance that is very creepy, and while I haven't yet read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, the excerpt in Harper's (unfortunately behind a paywall) is also deeply disturbing.

We have had a mania in the US for "privatizing" all sorts of functions that used to be performed by public agencies, and have witnessed a large number of disasters of public policy that led from that mania over the last few years. We have paid and will continue for years to pay the cost of having a government "small enough to drown it in a bathtub" - this is what happens when you elect people to govern who are convinced that governing is a bad idea.

One of the mantras of these people, though, is that the state must be stripped down to its core functions, the most important of those being national defense. Privatizing the armed forces is in violation of even that totally inadequate vision of government, so why is it fully accepted that we can't go to war without mercenaries? It may be cheaper (though I'm not even sure that's true)), but is it worth it to sacrifice the good name countless soldiers have died for to save a few bucks?