Author: Jeff Huber

This is the first article in a series on the future of American power.

In the post-Iraq era America will need to answer three critical questions about the nature of its military.

— What do we need the force to do?

— What kind of force do we need to do it?

— What kind of force can we afford?  

Below the fold: whose fights do we want to fight?

Real Security: The Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World calls for a “21st Century Military.”  Under Democratic leadership, the document states, America will “Rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.”

As with much of the Democrats’ security strategy, the notion of a 21st century military is vague, but when it comes to modern strategic force planning, vagueness is a virtue.

For starters, with so much of modern weaponry coming directly from off-the-shelf sources, what constitutes “state-of-the-art” changes rapidly, often from week to week. Iran’s recently unveiled maritime weapons and platforms, for example, herald a new geo-strategic calculus for U.S. naval forces that up to now have patrolled in the Arabian Gulf and northern Indian Ocean with relative impunity.  

Equally debatable is the question of where and when we’ll need to project power in order to protect ourselves.  If, for example, we become independent of foreign oil by 2020 as “Real Security” calls for, do we really need to bother to project naval power in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean?  If not, how much do we need to invest in countermeasures to Iran’s rocket torpedoes and stealthy patrol boats and anti-ship cruise missiles?  

Oil independence not only brings our maritime force strategy into question.  If we don’t have a vested interest in the flow of Gulf region oil, what’s the need to maintain a significant ground force footprint in the Middle East?  And if we don’t need to project land power in the Middle East, where else will we need to project it?  We’re certainly not going to conduct an Iraq-style invasion and occupation of Russia or China or Europe.  And nobody’s going to invade the continental United States.

Mister Bush has become fond of saying, “We can no longer hope that oceans protect us from harm.”  As with so much of what Bush says, that statement is largely bunk.

Yes, terrorists can sneak into this country, hijack airplanes, and drive them into skyscrapers.  But that was as true in 1948 as it is now.  Rogue nations like Iran or North Korea may someday be able to strike American cities with nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, but the Soviets became capable of doing that during the Eisenhower administration.  

But no one can muster sufficient ground forces to invade and occupy America, and even if they could, they couldn’t muster enough maritime or air transportation to bring a force that size across the oceans.  Even if they could muster that kind of transoceanic transportation, we could easily sink it or shoot it down before it got halfway here.

Some argue that the Iraq experience proves that we need to expand our land power services, but the real lesson learned from the Iraq war is that we don’t want to fight any more wars like it.  With no need for a standing ground force to repel a military invasion, America’s Army and Marine Corps will continue to conduct their primary business abroad.  But how much offshore business is left for them to engage in?  

Russia isn’t likely to invade Western Europe.  Its army has been bogged down in an insurgency style war in Chechnya for over a decade.  Mainland China might attempt to invade Taiwan, but helping Taiwan repel such an invasion would mainly involve air and maritime interdiction operations.  North Korea might invade South Korea, and any of several of its neighbors might attempt another invasion of Israel, but South Korea and Israel are capable of handling those contingencies without significant levels of assistance from U.S. ground forces.

It’s just possible, I suppose, that Russia and China might engage in a major land war along their mutual border.  But if they ever do, why would we want to step into the middle of it?  

So we can say we did?

Next week: war as an instrument of power in the next new world order.

Other Jeff Huber articles on national security issues:
In an Arms Race With Ourselves
Wars and Empires
Invasion of the Transformers

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Jammed off the radarscope this week by the Tom Delay story was the latest chapter in the long and winding saga of Jose Padilla.  On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear an appeal in Padilla’s case, thereby averting a showdown over separation of powers among the three branches of federal government.

Below the fold: the administration friendly Supreme Court lets war power claims stand…

Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested by the FBI in Chicago on May 8, 2002.  He was suspected of being part of an al Qaeda plot to target high-rise buildings with a radiological “dirty bomb.”  On June 9 of that year, Padilla was declared an “enemy combatant” and turned over to the Department of Defense, which incarcerated him in a Navy brig in South Carolina.  As an enemy combatant, he was denied access to a lawyer and the courts.  On June 11, attorney Donna Newman filed a habeas corpus petition on Padilla’s behalf with a U.S. District Court in New York that claimed the Bush administration had violated Padilla’s constitutional rights to due process.

A series of appeals and counter appeals ensued.  Administration legal guns like like James Comey argued that Padilla’s detainment was perfectly legal in light of Mister Bush’s constitutional authority as a wartime commander in chief and the powers granted to him by the Authorization for Use of Military Forces (AUMF) that Congress passed in 2001 days after the 9/11 attacks.  Padilla’s attorneys asserted that the administration’s use of the AUMF to justify holding Padilla without formal charges or due process amounted to a bill of attainder, which is expressly prohibited by Article I of the Constitution.

Time passed.  On September 9, 2005, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the government.

The Congress of the United States, in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, provided the President all powers necessary and appropriate to protect American citizens from terrorist acts by those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001…those powers include the power to detain identified and committed enemies such as Padilla…

The detention of petitioner being fully authorized by Act of Congress, the judgment of the district court that the detention of petitioner by the President of the United States is without support in law is hereby reversed.

The Fourth Circuit is widely considered to be the most conservative and Bush administration friendly appeals court in the country.  Justice Michael Luttig, who wrote the Fourth Circuit’s Padilla opinion, was under consideration for nomination to a seat on the Supreme Court.

On October 25, 2005, Padilla’s attorneys appealed his case to the Supreme Court.  The administration’s deadline for filing arguments was November 28, but days prior to the deadline administration lawyers pulled a switch.  On November 22, a federal jury in Miami indicted Padilla on charges that he had conspired to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas.”  The indictment made no mention of the original “dirty bomb” charge.  

The administration asked the Fourth Circuit to withdraw its Padilla finding and have the prisoner turned over to federal custody.  Justice Luttig refused, chastising the administration for using one set of facts to justify holding Padilla in military custody and another to charge him in a federal court.  

On January 4, 2006, the Supreme Court overruled the Fourth Circuit and agreed to let the military transfer Padilla to Miami to face criminal charges.  

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Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory was among the many commentators who said the administration had pressed Padilla with criminal charges in order to avoid a constitutional face off in the Supreme Court that it knew it would lose.  Some suggested that Chief Justice John Roberts had “suggested” to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that if he moved the Padilla case to the civilian justice system, the Supreme Court could reasonably refuse to hear the appeal on the basis that it would become “hypothetical” once Padilla was no longer being held as an enemy combatant.

Few would question that Roberts is a friend of the administration.  On July 15, 2005, as a member of District of Columbia Court of Appeals, he ruled in favor of the government in the terror related case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.  That same day, he met with Mister Bush to discuss his nomination to the Supreme Court.  

Others suggested that Luttig declined to play ball because his nose had been bent out of joint when he wasn’t nominated to the Supreme Court.

Whatever the case, Padilla’s legal team continued to push for a reversal of the Fourth Circuit’s earlier decision.  In December of 2005, they filed an appeal requesting the Supreme Court to resolve the Constitutional issues involved with the case, specifically on whether or not the AUMF constituted a bill of attainder and whether the term “enemy combatant” had any basis in U.S. or international law.

This was the appeal that the Supreme Court declined to consider on Monday by a 6-3 vote.  It takes four votes for the court to hear an appeal.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer cast the dissenting votes, arguing that nothing prevented the government from reversing course again and placing Padilla back in military custody.

Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, John Roberts and John Paul Stevens said they had rejected the case because Padilla is no longer held by the military.

Nonetheless, the three justices warned the administration that the federal courts stand ready to intervene “were the government to seek to change the status or conditions of Padilla’s custody” if he is acquitted in federal court.  

So once again, we have “a something for everyone” decision from the Supreme Court.  Padilla has access to due process, and the administration has been cautioned not to pull any more fast ones regarding his legal status.

But the Fourth Circuit’s 2005 decision still stands.

Mister Bush can order U.S. citizens to be arrested on American soil and hold them indefinitely without being charged or facing trial.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Speaking to a British audience last week about the war on terror, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “I know we’ve made tactical errors, thousands of them I’m sure.  But when you look back in history, what will be judged will be, did you make the right strategic decisions.”

I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Rice’s British audience, a foreign policy think tank known as Chatham House, didn’t have the same reaction to her remarks as did former head of U.S. Central Command Anthony Zinni.  

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Zinni said there has been “…a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the secretary of state say these were tactical mistakes. These were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policy made back here.”

Below the fold: you can win a thousand battles…

I don’t always agree with Zinni, but on this issue he’s spot on target.  The disaster the Bush administration has created in the Gulf Region isn’t the result of tactical errors.  It’s the result of the fundamentally flawed neoconservative vision of a democratic Middle East remade in America’s image at the point of a gun.

The loose political/military planning and action hierarchy of vision to policy to strategy to operations to tactics has been adopted for use for just about every other human endeavor from international business to personal growth.  It’s often difficult to draw a distinct line between, say, a “vision” and a “policy,” and different schools of thought define these things differently.  But generally speaking, a “vision statement” addresses the question “what are our long term goals?” and tactics are tasks performed on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis that support the higher order objectives of strategy, policy, and vision.  

When tactics are executed successfully–as they by and large have been in Iraq and elsewhere–but do not effect the political aims, it’s usually because the political aims are unachievable by the tactical means chosen to support them.

Thus it is with the foreign policy path we have followed for the past five years.  In the late nineties, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton and other key members of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century convinced themselves that the U.S. could create a stable Middle East through preemptive and aggressive use of armed force.  Look what resulted.

The situation in Iraq continues to unravel.  It has descended through insurgency to civil war, and now is on the verge of being immersed in an all out Hobbesian war, a war in which every man is armed and dozens if not hundreds of factions contend to achieve goals not readily identified or achievable.

Afghanistan, the “crown jewel” in our war on terror, has become the world’s leading narco-state and is once again a safe haven for the Taliban.

Thanks to America’s promotion of the democratic process in the Gulf Region, terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah have gained legitimate political power in Palestine and Lebanon.  In Egypt on Saturday, three months after parliamentary elections were held, a gunfight broke out in the headquarters of that country’s oldest opposition political party.  A local journalist said, “The incident is proof that none of the secular opposition parties are capable of resolving their rapidly growing internal differences.” Saudi Arabia held its first municipal elections in February of 2005.  Women were excluded from voting, and half the seats were appointed by the central government which maintains veto power over the elected officials. Over in Pakistan, our buddy General Pervez Musharraf has had to cut deals with hard line Islamic parties and rewrite the Pakistani constitution to maintain his hold on power.  

As to Iran, our single greatest “challenge” in the region: while we were distracted by our fascination over whether the Iranians seek to develop nuclear weapons, we didn’t notice they were developing a long range, high speed torpedo that will present a profound potential threat to U.S. warships not only in the Arabian Gulf, but over a significant portion of the northern Indian Ocean.

Looking Back from the Future

If the Gulf region is stable twenty years from now, it won’t be because of the Bush administration strategies.  It will because someone was miraculously able to come along and clean up the mess the neoconservatives created.  And no matter how the Middle East looks in the year 2026, there will be no reason to believe it looks any better than it would have if we had simply kept the toothless Saddam Hussein contained and waited for him to die of old age.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Reading “Insulating Bush,” the latest revelation of cooked intelligence and cover ups by Murray Waas, felt like a walk down Memory Lane.  

Below the fold: smoke, mirrors, and great balls of fire…

Last summer, during the height of the media frenzy over the Plamegate scandal, numerous commentators observed that the issue was about much more than who did or didn’t out the identity of a CIA agent.  It was about the cover up of the administration’s hoax to “prove” that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program.  

As Waas duly notes, there were plenty of folks in the mainstream media at the time who tried to get the hoax story before the public, but they were drowned out by the Rovewellian noise machine that planted images of mushroom clouds in the collective American mind.

Jumping ahead to the present, we see that the administration’s new National Security Strategy has identified a new “most wanted” bogey man: “we may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

Iran has an economy roughly the size of Holland’s and a conventional military force that couldn’t beat Saddam Hussein’s over the course of a drawn out war in the ’80s.  What the administration fears–or wants to make us fear–is that Iran will use its infant nuclear energy program to produce bombs.  Iran has always avowed that it has no desire to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, and the accusations of Condi Rice and others aside, there’s no hard evidence that proves they’re lying.

The Bush administration is pushing the UN to impose sanctions on Iran if it doesn’t allow International Atomic Energy Agency oversight of its nuclear program, but Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, thinks sanctions at this time are unnecessary. “Sanctions are a bad idea,” he said this week.  “We are not facing an imminent threat. We need to lower the pitch.”

Lowering the pitch on Iran is the last thing the Bush administration wants to do right now.  It needs to generate as much smoke as it can to divert attention from the latest Downing Street memo and Waas’s uncovering of the National Intelligence Estimate summary written for Mister Bush that the aluminum tubes referred to in his 2003 State of the Union speech were probably not intended for nuclear weapons.  

The administration also needs to draw the public focus away from the ongoing Iraq fiasco, and from its abject failure to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them on Taiwan, Japan, and other U.S. friendly countries in the Pacific Rim.

Most of all, the Bush administration wants to keep everyone from reflecting on the aggregate absurdity of its foreign policy.  It invaded and occupied a country that didn’t have nuclear weapons, it’s making scare noise at a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons and says it doesn’t want any, and it has promised not to attack a country that not only admits to having nukes, but says that it might use them in a preemptive strike.

And oh yeah; it needs to get everybody’s mind off of the NSA domestic spying scandal.  

Visions of Mushroom Clouds

The emergence of two recent stories is too timely to be coincidental.  One is the hoopla over the Iraqi document dump.  House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) forced the intelligence agencies, over their objections, to release thousands of raw documents captured into Iraq over the Internet.  Senior intelligence officials say the documents contain hearsay, disinformation, and forgery, and Intelligence Director John Negroponte released a disclaimer with the documents stating the U.S. government could not vouch for their authenticity.  

The lack of authenticity caution didn’t stop the right wing blogosphere from glomming onto the documents, interpreting them with “in house” translators, and producing “expert analyses” that they prove Bush was right about Iraq all along. “Saddam’s WMD and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!” trumpets one of these experts who bills himself in his blog bio as “The smartest man alive!!!”

This kind of transparent maneuver isn’t likely to fool anyone except the carnival side show types who populate Free Republic and other fringe web sites, but it will least keep the fringe firmly in the “base.”

In concert with the data dump, though, is another piece of Rovewellian Theater that may influence the political center.  News of it was released just in time to cover the commencement of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing considering censure of Mister Bush for his NSA domestic spying program.  

WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson reports:

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada’s desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive — the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site — as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.

The test, code-named “Divine Strake,” will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.

June will be about the time the Iran nuclear issue reaches critical mass, and six months before the national elections.  The spectacle will be touted as a “strong message to Iran” that we can bust their bunkers if they force us to.  But the real target audience will be the U.S. public, who will be treated to an actual visual image of something they’ve only been led to imagine before:  a mushroom cloud rising over a major American city.

Gosh, what won’t the Rovewellians think of next?

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I’m not surprised that on the day after releasing the story on the latest Downing Street Memo, The New York Times ran one on the Iraqi document dump.

Below the fold: kooks, spies, and the smartest man alive…

Yesterday, NYT’s Scott Shane reported:

American intelligence agencies and presidential commissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein had no unconventional weapons and no substantive ties to Al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion.

But now, an unusual experiment in public access is giving anyone with a computer a chance to play intelligence analyst and second-guess the government.

Under pressure from Congressional Republicans, the director of national intelligence has begun a yearlong process of posting on the Web 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops.

Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view.

Shane says that Intelligence officials had objected to releasing raw documents that contain hearsay, disinformation and forgery.  Intelligence director John Negroponte’s office released a disclaimer with the documents that said the government could not vouch for their authenticity.

The drive to force the documents’ release was led by House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), who does not believe the documents have received sufficient “scrutiny.”

One of the leading conservative bloggers scrutinizing the documents is former Army officer Ray Robison, who told Shane, “No offense, but the mainstream media tells people what they want them to know.”  Robison also said, “It’s not about politics.  It’s about the truth.”

Lord of the Flies

On of Robison’s blog headlines boldly declares “Saddam’s WMD and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!.”  

What follows is Robison’s analysis of document IZSP-2003-00003336, which he claims is “proof” of a Hussein plot to attack his own citizens with anthrax and make it look like U.S. forces did it.

Shane’s take on Robison’s analysis:

But the anthrax document that intrigued Mr. Robison, the Alabama blogger, does not seem to prove much. It is a message from the Quds Army, a regional militia created by Mr. Hussein, to Iraqi military intelligence that passes on reports picked up by troops, possibly from the radio, since the information is labeled “open source” and “impaired broadcast.” No anthrax was found in Iraq by American search teams.

Here is a verbatim sample of the text from Robison’s blog piece:

Now this letter is from al-Quds, a Jihad organization that supports the Palestinians. Saddam was the patriarch and Iraq officers worked closely with them…

…The al-Quds are covering their own butts by telling the IIS what they have been ordered to do or even trying to get them to stop Saddam since the war is immanent. If Saddam wanted to kill Iraqis with anthrax to make it look like the U.S. did it, it would be wise for him to use Palestinians instead of Iraqis. Therefor, it makes sense that he ordered the al-Quds to do it.

Iraqis might not carry out the order.

How seriously should we take Robison’s conclusions?  

In his one line bio, Robison describes himself as “The smartest man alive!!!”  He repeats this self-appellation in his full biography (copied here verbatim).

Hi folks, I am a military operations research analyst with a defense contractor in aviation and missile research. Before that I was an army officer and member of the Iraq Survey Group.  
I set up this site to provide some military expertise in analyzing political events. The main stream media almost always get it wrong, and somebody has to clear up the BS. Guess that leaves it to me, which is okay, because I am the smartest man alive!!! Really folks, I just ask that we keep the comments clean for the kiddies and I will delete the F’bomb and S’bomb (cutesy substitutes are okay), very personal insults, rascist comments, and threats. Now tremble as you prepare to be crushed under my awesome logic and reasoning capacity!!! I will destroy you, AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! (my threats are okay)

One of my favorite examples of his awesome logic and reasoning power is, “I know this sounds crazy, but it is too much of a coincidence.”

I don’t know about you, but I always tremble at the logic and reasoning of people who admit that they know they sound crazy.

Robison describes his interests as “The fam, the new Battlestar Galactica, Futurama, movies in general, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.”

“Kooked”

Robison was not happy with the way he was portrayed in yesterday morning’s NYT article.  Yesterday afternoon, he posted that he had called someone at the conservative National Review Online who agreed that author Scott Shane had “kooked” him.  

Robison then listed his military training, experience, and decorations, which included “Odles (sic) of medals I won’t list here.” He followed that with “Kook that, Scott.”

At the end of that post, he wrote, “UPDATE: just talked with Scott (NYT), he says the Kooking wasn’t intentional, due to space issues…”

The only “kooking” Scott Shane did was quote Robison a few times, which was nothing compared to the kooking Robison does to himself on his own web site.

Loonies, Crazies, and Freepers

National Review Online rushed to Robison’s defense, calling him “…a far cry from the loony-toony crazy-conservative blogger portrayed in the NYT.

NRO must not have visited Robison’s blog yet, or read what his supporters over at Free Republic are saying about Shane’s NYT article and the document dump issue.

Mr. Shahda [a translator of the documents] said he was proud he could help make the documents public. “I live in this great country, and it’s a time of war,” he said. “This is the least I can do.”

Don’t we wish the liberal trash in this country felt the same way?

What happened that they became so rabidly anti American that I cannot say ‘liberal ‘ without saying ‘liberal trash?’

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The girly-man CIA as been at war against the administration for some time.

Bush knows that they are dragging thier feet on these documents because they don’t want to find anything that might support the administration.

So, you could call this document dump: The Empire Leaks Back.

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Before this is over, the NYT will look like the biased fools they are. Those documents are providing a virtual tsunami of information and the leftists will be exposed as liars.
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i wonder if our site isn’t MORE than a conservative news site, as mentioned in the article….sumptin like this site stands for: “truth, justice and ‘the American way'”-we’ve jus gotta get a consensus on ‘the American way’….

I shudder to imagine what the Freepers’ consensus on “the American way” might be, or how they might arrive at it.  Maybe they’ll just leave the judgment on that up to the smartest man alive!!!

Kooky Like a Fox?

You have to hand this much to the smartest man alive!!!–his blog site has more sponsors than a NASCAR team.  The front page is plastered with full color ads for Playboy and Fredrick’s of Hollywood (yes, the ads feature models).  But he also has sponsors like Amazon, iTunes, and a number of military oriented publications.

Draw your own conclusions on what this says about the nature of commercialism and political debate in contemporary America.  I can summarize mine in one word:

Yikes!!!

I can hardly believe I live in an age where the rabid right can draw attention away from the latest Downing Street Memo by unleashing its blog dogs.  But that’s just what it’s doing, and some of America’s large corporations are funding the project.  

And wittingly or not, mainstream media like the NYT are adding to the smoke screen by acting as another wall in the kooky echo chamber.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.  

NYT’s Don Van Natta Jr. reports this morning on yet another Downer Street Memo.

Below the fold: Bush caught with his hand in the cookie jar again, and Charles Krauthammer makes fun of the sissy “defeatists”…NYT’s Don Van Natta Jr. reports this morning on yet another Downing Street Memo.

Below the fold: Bush caught with his hand in the cookie jar again, and Charles Krauthammer makes fun of the sissy “defeatists”…

In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

I’m glad to see continued evidence of the Bush administration’s war hoax coming to light, but am not sure how much good it’s going to do.  We already know what he pulled, and unless the Democrats gain majorities in both the House and Senate come November, Mister Bush will likely never pay a penalty for the disasters he’s created, and neither will any of his sidemen.

I’ve summarized on a number of occasions how the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) first proposed what became the Bush II Iraq policy in 1998.  The PNAC membership included a number of prominent figures who later played key roles in the Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz to name a few.  PNAC also attracted a number of high profile conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer, the WaPo columnist whose signature appeared on the September 20, 2001 urging Mister Bush to remove Saddam Hussein from power whether he turned out to be connected to the 9/11 attacks or not.

Krauthammer’s one of the hawks who still drums support for their woebegone war and whom the logically impaired still listen to.

In last Fridays column, Krauthammer says “Of Course it’s a Civil War,” and what’s the big deal?  He was calling it a civil war a year and a half ago.  Nothing’s changed, nothing’s new, there’s not need to get all “defeatist.”

He accuses former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi–who said last week that Iraq is in a civil war and is nearing the point of no return–of having an “ax to grind.”  But it’s hard to imagine Allawi having an ax anywhere near the size of Krauthammer’s.  Unlike Krauthammer, Allawi didn’t beg Mister Bush to invade his country.

The article contains Krauthammer’s standard assortment of glittering generalities, faulty assumptions, straw man stuffing, false analogies, and other cheap rhetoric tricks.  This part cries out for serious deconstructing:

The problem is the police forces, which have been infiltrated by some of the Mahdi Army and other freelance Shiite vigilantes…

… But let’s put this in perspective. First, this kind of private revenge attack has been going on at a low level since the beginning of the insurgency. Second, it does have the effect of concentrating Sunni minds on the price of their continuing support for the random, large-scale and heretofore unanswered slaughter of Shiites that they either actively or passively support.
And, third, if the private militias are the problem, it is a focused and relatively narrow problem. Creating discipline and central control over the security services is a more manageable issue than all-out Hobbesian conflict.

That “private revenge” attacks have been going on for years doesn’t make them okay, especially when it appears that they’ll be going on for years to come.  

Little in war is certain.  To infer that revenge attacks serve a good purpose by “concentrating Sunni minds” is to claim that Krauthammer and those like him “know the enemy” when the overwhelming burden of our experience in Iraq proves that they don’t.  History is rife with case studies of societies that continued to fight long after rational hindsight shows they should have thrown in the towel.  Germany and Japan are two of the most obvious examples.  

“Unanswered slaughter” of Shiites by the Sunnis?  Hmm.  As I recall, the mightiest nation in the history of humanity sent its all time best-trained, best-equipped military half-way across the world to beat the holy hell out of the army that slaughtered all those Shiites, toss the Sunni leader who commanded them in the slammer, and then turn the country over to the Shiite majority.  How much more “answer” does Krauthammer need?

The militia problem is anything but focused and narrow.  It’s a cat rodeo.  When your police are infiltrated by militiamen who place loyalty to their militias above loyalty to the government, you’re in a Hobbesian war.  And the kind of discipline and control it takes to manage a problem like involves a long wall and truckloads of blindfolds and cigarettes, which generally turns a Hobbesian war even more Hobbesian.

Bush and Krauthammer are two key indicators that most of our once mighty nation is sucking on a giant, Orwellian crack pipe.  Krauthammer helped shape the Iraq invasion policy and Miser Bush executed it on false pretexts.  Yet, incredibly, people still pay attention to what Krauthammer has to say and Bush is still the president of the United States of America.    

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his daily commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword

Promoted by Steven D.

One of the joys of doing satire-oriented commentary is that the more you research, the more the irrationalities jump out at you.  Here’s a collection of quotes I put together over the last week, starting with our founding document and meandering in no particularly logical order.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
— Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Below the fold: “We hold these absurdities to be self-evident…”

“My most important job… is to protect America.”
— George W. Bush, March 20, 2006

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”
— Benjamin Franklin, 18th century

“…The term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession…”
— Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, February 4, 1985

“[Interrogation must include] injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions–in order to constitute torture.”
— Alberto Gonzales, August 1, 2002

“Detainees held in Afghanistan by American troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process… Five detainees have died in custody, three of them in suspicious circumstances, and survivors have told stories of beatings, strippings, hoodings and sleep deprivation.”
— Guardian Unlimited, June 23, 2004

“[E]vidence came to light that the U.S. administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the U.N. Convention against Torture.”
— Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan, May, 2005

“Anything we do to [counter terrorism] is within the law.  We do not torture.”
— George W. Bush, November, 2005

“Amnesty International castigated the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as a failure Wednesday, calling it ‘the gulag of our time’ in the human rights group’s harshest rebuke yet of American detention policies.”
— Associated Press, May 26,
2005

“…we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law…”
— George W. Bush, June 26, 2005

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
— Voltaire, 18th century

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld dismissed suggestions that 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are engaged in a guerrilla war or bogged down in a Vietnam-like “quagmire.”
— The Washington Post, July 1, 2003

“The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
Dick Cheney, June 20, 2005

“It is unfortunate that we are in civil war,”
— Iyad Allawi, former interim Prime Minister, March, 2006

“Because collecting foreign intelligence information without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment and because the Terrorist Surveillance Program is lawful, there appears to be no legal barrier against introducing this evidence in a criminal prosecution.”
— Department of Justice spokesman, March 24, 2006

“I also appreciate your strong commitment to democracy, itself: rule of law, and freedom to worship, freedom of the press, the ability for governments to be transparent, and governments to have checks and balances so that we deal with the rule of law, not the rule of man.”
— George W. Bush, November 27, 2005, to President Torrijos of Panama

“[T]he Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government.”
— Glenn Greenwald, Unclaimed Territory, March 25, 2006

“We seek the end of tyranny in our world.”
— George W. Bush, January 31, 2006

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
— Mark Twain, 19th century

“‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’…To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
— George Orwell, 1949

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his daily commentaries at eOluribus Media and Pen and Sword

In response to this week’s articles on the administration’s “no good news in the media campaign” and viral propaganda, Oui sent me this link to the White House Website.

Lo and behold!  From July of 2005, assistant deputy Secretary of Defense Allison Barber hosting “Ask the White House.”  If you haven’t been tracking the administration’s media bashing strategy, this is a good place to start.  The basic message at the time was that open criticism of Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the gang was hurting the morale of the troops.  I’ll run portions of it here.  Watch how “cleverly” they sneak into the attack mode.

Below the fold: Dear Allison, I think Mister Bush is very wonderful. How wonderful do you think he is?

Meleah, from Joplin Missouri writes: Ms. Barber, Would you please explain exactly what the “America Supports You” program is? Thank you for taking the time to answer my question Meleah

Allison Barber
Thank you for your question, Meleah. America Supports You came about to fill a simple need: to communicate America’s support for the military to our men and women in uniform. Several months ago we began to hear disturbing questions from our brave troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. They didn’t know if Americans still stood behind them…

William, from Lansing, MI writes: What is the best way an ordinary citizen can show his support for out troops? Also, how is the morale of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Allison Barber
Great question, William! There are so many ways to show your support. First, we’d love for you to log on and visit www.AmericaSupportsYou.mil and send a message of support directly to our troops…

John, from Charlotte, NC writes: I just watched “our” President give an emotional speech at Fort Bragg and I’m so proud to say I’m an American. You could tell at the end of his speech, he was so proud of the men and women who support and defend our country. He mentioned a website to help support our troops. What was the site and is it up and running yet?

Allison Barber
Thank you John for that great question and for the pride your comment clearly shows you have in our wonderful country. During his speech to the world on Tuesday, President Bush encouraged all Americans to take a moment this 4th of July to thank the troops for our freedom by visiting www.AmericaSupportsYou.mil.

You caught the little subliminal thingy about “our” President, right?  The one we real Americans support all the way?

This next question is from a citizen who had his doubts about Mister Bush at first, but has finally seen the light…

Doug, from Seaford, DE writes: I didn’t originally vote for President Bush but I now realize that he has succeeded in protecting our country from additional terrorist attacks. Our men and women in uniform deserve our praise and thanks for their efforts and sacrifice to protect our freedom — as well as providing hope and a brighter future for the Iraqi people.

Allison Barber
Doug, you are absolutely right. As I am sure you know, this week marks the one-year anniversary of Iraqi sovereignty. One year ago this week, 25 million Iraqis were liberated from one of the 20th Centuries most brutal regimes. The freedom they enjoy today, and the security we have at home, has been bought with the courage and sacrifice of our military men and women…

And here comes the napalm…

Joshua, from Miami, FL writes: _Secretary Barber, How has all of the negative media about Iraq and Guantanamo effected (sic) the morale of our troops? Does the viceral nature of those opposed to the war have a negative effect on our troops?

Allison Barber
Great question Joshua. You are absolutely right to ask about the morale of our troops around the world. Having traveled to Iraq personally, and being the spouse of an army reservist that just returned home from a yearlong deployment to Iraq, I can tell you wholeheartedly that our troops get their strength and their determination from the knowledge that they have the full support and backing of the folks backs home. The negative images on TV and unfortunate comments by some trying to make a political point can all effect (sic) the morale of our troops. But as we here back home know first hand, the vast majority of Americans stand steadfast with our troops. Making sure they know they have that support is the #1 goal of America Supports You…

In any other place, at any other time, with any other organization than the Bush administration, this transparently crafted “Ask the White House” session would have come off like a conscious self-parody.  But the Bushlanders and their supporters take this kind of stuff dead seriously.  

Previous “Ask the White House” sessions conducted by Harriet Miers indicated that the “hosts” don’t write the answers themselves.  That Barber’s answers in this may well have been ghosted or plagiarized is somewhat disturbing.  But it’s even more disturbing to consider that they may well have been answers to real questions asked by real people.  Well, real Stepford people.

Heck, that whole Fourth of July America Supports You weekend production was disturbing.  The administration, deflecting blame for its woebegone Iraq fiasco by demonizing the press and hiding behind the troops.  The big propaganda production staged in Washington D.C. disguised as a pep rally.  

Taxpayers funded the rally, but apparently didn’t have to shoulder the whole cost.  America Supports You has a slew of Corporate Team Members that includes outfits like Anheuser Bush, McDonalds, and MARVEL Enterprises.

It’s a sad commentary on American culture when big companies can use human suffering and our troops to sell beer, hamburgers, and comic books and nobody bats an eye about it.

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Along with her involvement with America Supports You, Allison Barber is in charge of the Defense Department’s internal communications, which include American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), the Pentagon Channel, Stars and Stripes, and other DoD controlled media.  In summer of 2004, Barber admitted that AFRTS selects programs based on content rather than popularity (Rush Limbaugh is HUGE with AFRTS).  In October of 2005, Barber was caught on tape coaching soldiers prior to a live question and answer teleconference with Mister Bush.  Shortly afterward, she cancelled the planned debut of liberal talk show host Ed Shultz’s radio program from the Armed Forces Radio schedule.  

If you’ve ever been stationed overseas with the military, you know that these outlets are often the only English language media available.  That goes a long way in explaining why a Zogby poll conducted in February of this year indicated that 85 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq think their mission is to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”

Which just goes to show how you can shape young minds when you can hold them captive to the Big Brother Broadcast.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his daily commentaries at Pen and Sword and ePluripus Media.

This morning I got an e-mail from an old Navy buddy that he and I both think is a piece of Rovewellian monkey business.  

The subject is “Too Graphic for the ‘Main’ Stream Media.”  

Below the fold: how viral propaganda works and how much you’re exposed to it…

The opening paragraph says “Here is an important message you are not likely to get anywhere else, particularly from U.S. News sources–Pictures From Iraq That Are Too Shocking & Graphic for The Mainstream Media.”

Below that is a series of digital photographs depicting “positive images” from Iraq.  Several show U.S. soldiers visiting Iraqi kids at their schools and playing with them on the street.  In one, an Iraqi woman holds up two handwritten signs that read “Iraqi people happy today.  Thank You Thank You U.S.A.”  In another, an Iraqi boy in a car holds out a sign that says, “Thank You Very much Mr. BUSH.”

The last image–one that I found genuinely touching–was of an armed soldier in full combat gear bending over to pet someone’s cat.

Beneath the cat picture comes text that I’ve intentionally pasted here verbatim:

Sometimes in our everyday  lives we tend to forget what’s going  on elsewhere in the world and that the  brave men and women of the  service are just like you and I. They have family  and friends back home  who love them very much and are praying for their safe  return.  

When you receive this, please stop for a moment and say a  prayer  for our troops (land, air, and sea) in Afghanistan,  Kuwait, Iraq,   and around the world. There is nothing attached…….  This  can be very powerful……. Just  send this to people in your address  book.   Do not stop the wheel,  please….

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I wouldn’t have a problem with people passing this sort of chain letter around if I thought for a moment it was on the up and up.  But this looks entirely too much like government manufactured viral propaganda.  It has all the earmarks.

For starters, the e-mail contains no trace that I can find of its origin.  That’s something that originators of chain letters almost have to do on purpose for the purpose of hiding their identities.  

The closing text is so clumsily worded and typed that it seems to have been deliberately crafted in order to convince the receiver that it came from someone who’s “just plain folks.”  The “please…..” at the end sounds like its coming from the poor little pussy cat–which, by the way, has to be the healthiest, best fed, cutest looking pussy cat in Iraq right now.

Then there are the photos themselves.  Some may be genuine pictures taken by regular soldiers, but they’d have to be regular soldiers who either know how to take good pictures or are wizards at Photo Shop.  Some images look suspiciously staged, especially the ones of everyday Iraqis holding up signs handwritten in English.  However genuine the pictures may or may not be, they were compiled by someone who knows how to use images to convey a striking emotional message.  Saving the cat for last was a nice touch, even if a bit obvious.

And for this kind of thing to be making its way around the web as the administration runs its “no good news in the media” campaign is timing too perfect to be coincidental.

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I’m not wild about the idea, but I can accept the government spreading this kind of information over the web if it’s honest about where the message is coming from.  And I think it’s fine for Americans to help spread it around of their own free wills as long as they know they’re distributing government propaganda.

But if my suspicions are correct–and I’m convinced they are–this is the covert part of an orchestrated government propaganda operation aimed at U.S. citizens, and it is wrong.  

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Frankly, I don’t blame the media for not reporting enough good news from Iraq.  Whatever good news there is, it’s not good enough to balance the bad news, or to justify the reasons for war.  The Bush administration has yet to give us a straight answer as to what those reasons actually were, but you can bet a paycheck we didn’t invade Iraq so our soldiers could hand out crayons to Iraqi school kids, or play soccer with them, or pet their putty tats.

The good news out of Iraq isn’t relevant, and there’s no reason for the media to waste a significant amount of bandwidth on it.

As for the bad news, I think the visual media have shown considerable restraint in the images it has chosen to show us.  Maybe too much restraint.  If we saw high quality visuals of all the violence we hear about, the anti-war movement would shift into overdrive.  

Some have suggested the major mainstream media bear responsibility for helping the administration sell this woebegone Iraq incursion to the public by channeling its pro-war drumbeats through Judith Miller and others.  There’s something to that argument, but keep in mind that if the big news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post are guilty of anything, they’re guilty of being duped, and don’t bear nearly as much guilt as the dupers who duped them, and who are now trying to transfer blame for the war’s failures from themselves to the media they duped at the outset.

And if I weren’t so outraged, I’d find it a delicious piece of irony that the administration is using one medium in a discreditable manner to discredit the other media.  

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Viral propaganda works much like viral marketing.  Viral marketing is a pyramid advertising scheme in which “genuine” word of mouth personal testimony about a commercial product’s virtues is spread by “plain folks” who have been paid and trained to spread it but who don’t let their target audiences know that.  It’s normally conducted in conjunction with more overt, traditional advertising campaigns.  “Viral marketing” is an Internet age term that reflects the language of the contemporary information age–covert “testimonial” advertising can literally be spread like a computer virus.

But covert viral marketing isn’t limited to the electronic information sphere.  Viral marketers arrive at parties, cookouts, school and church functions, and other social events with free samples of the products they’re hawking.  They engage family, friends, and acquaintances in conversations into which they interject carefully prepared and easily remembered slogans, buzz phrases, mantras, memes, and talking points.  

Pretty soon, the viral marketers’ targets are repeating the marketing rhetoric, unknowingly becoming unpaid non-salaried employees of a sophisticated advertising firm.

Viral propaganda functions in much the same way, except it’s selling something far more sinister than barbecue sausage or underarm deodorant.  

As you find yourself in social situations over the next few weeks, make a conscious effort to notice how many times you hear the phrase “no good news” comes up in conversation.  See if you, for the sake of being amiable, agree with the speaker, and add a few comments of your own about the lamentable state of the open press.  

And ask yourself if you haven’t picked up the virus.  

If you’re of a mind to, ask people who bring up the “no good news” slogan who they think is really responsible for the mess in Iraq, the press or the administration.  How they respond should give you a pretty good idea of where they stand in the propaganda pyramid.  

If they answer, “Well, that’s what everybody says,” you’ll know they’re pretty close to the bottom of it.  If they deftly change the subject to something politically neutral, you can safely assume they’re well indoctrinated in the Rovewellian method.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his daily commentaries at Pen and Sword and ePluripus Media.

I keep wondering how much longer the so-called mainstream media are going to play along with Karl Rove’s game.  Much of the Bush administration’s political strategy is formed on lessons learned during the Nixon years, the era in which people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld cut their Capitol teeth.  

Below the fold: Cheney shoots himself in the lawyer, press shoots itself in the foot…
Among the biggest lessons, as far as they’re concerned, is that the Nixon presidency was brought down by the “liberal” news coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate.  In intervening years, the right has conducted a lamentably successful campaign to establish a conservative media network and to demonize any media that isn’t part of the Big Brother Broadcast (Fox News, A.M. talk radio, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, etc.)

To hear the Rovewellians tell the tale of the Nixon years, the only thing wrong with the Vietnam War was that the press turned the public against it, and hounded Tricky Dick out of office for doing things that were really no big deal.  

They won’t bother to tell you that the people who lost the Vietnam War were bad politicians and bad generals who misled the public about progress of the conflict for a decade.  They won’t mention that it was the Nixon administration, not the press, that committed a felony crime when it broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters during the 1972 presidential campaign, then committed further felonies by obstructing the investigation of the break in.  And they’ll never bother to remind you that the media were every bit as critical of Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s presidency as they were of Nixon’s.  

Play it Again

Today, we’re in the middle of a bad war initiated on fuzzy pretexts and run badly by bad politicians and bad generals, and we have a president who has broken laws, unilaterally abrogated treaties, and violated the constitution.  Miraculously, however, much of the American public has the perception that the bad politicians and bad generals haven’t done anything bad.  It’s all the media’s fault.

And the media have been perfectly willing to take the blame.

This week, Mister Bush took to the road to sell his war in Iraq on its third anniversary before televised Town Hall style encounters with “real folks” asking “spontaneous” questions.  These events, covered by the very media the Bush administration scapegoats, were no more genuine than a zirconium engagement ring, but I didn’t hear a single commentator question if maybe it wasn’t all just another staged propaganda event.

I don’t buy for a minute that Bush’s handlers actually let him loose in uncontrolled environments.  All those “hard ball” questions he fielded on Monday by “average citizens” in the Cleveland City Club sounded as though they were read from scripts, and Bush’s answers sounded as scripted as the question.

The grand production on Wednesday in West Virginia was downright embarrassing.  Speaking before a crowd of 2,100, made up largely of military families, Mister Bush came off as the darling of the American people.  From the transcript:

Q: Mr. President, I have a son that’s special forces in Iraq. And I have another son — (applause.) I have another son that’s in the Army. He left college to join the Army. He’s out in Hawaii. He’s got the good duty right now. (Laughter.) But I thank God that you’re our Commander-in-Chief. And I wouldn’t want my boys — (applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, thanks.

Q: Again, I thank God you’re our Commander-in-Chief. You’re a man for our times. And I’m supporter of yours. And I think it’s good that you come out and tell your story. And I think you need to keep doing more of it, and tell the story and the history of all this. And God bless you. And I thank you for your service.

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Q: Sir, thank you for being in West Virginia. I’m the recruiting commander of the West Virginia Army National Guard. And there are a lot of National Guardsmen here with you in Wheeling today. West Virginians are a proud and very patriotic people. I’d like for you to share with us what you would say to a young person today who would like to join the National Guard, and maybe give some encouraging words in that respect.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, thanks–kind of doing your job for you. All right. (Laughter and applause.) My statement to all Americans is serve your country one way or another. I–and service can be done by wearing the uniform. Wearing the uniform is a fantastic way to say, I want to serve my country. A lot of people have chosen that way, and it’s a rewarding experience to wear the uniform. If you want to go to college, it’s a good way to gain some skills to help you in your education.

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Q: President Bush, I’m a professional firefighter here in Wheeling, West Virginia.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, sir. (Applause.)

Q: And back during 9/11, I lost over 300 of my brothers in New York. And I was glad that you were our President at that time and took the fight to the terrorists…

Here’s the kicker: I’ve seen it replayed twice on MSNBC.  

Q: I have a comment, first of all, and then just a real quick question. I want to let you know that every service at our church you are, by name, lifted up in prayer, and you and your staff and all of our leaders. And we believe in you. We are behind you. And we cannot thank you enough for what you’ve done to shape our country. (Applause.)

This is my husband, who has returned from a 13-month tour in Tikrit.

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yes. Thank you. Welcome back. (Applause.)

Q: His job while serving was as a broadcast journalist. And he has brought back several DVDs full of wonderful footage of reconstruction, of medical things going on. And I ask you this from the bottom of my heart, for a solution to this, because it seems that our major media networks don’t want to portray the good. They just want to focus — (applause) —

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, hold on a second.

Q: They just want to focus on another car bomb, or they just want to focus on some more bloodshed, or they just want to focus on how they don’t agree with you and what you’re doing, when they don’t even probably know how you’re doing what you’re doing anyway. But what can we do to get that footage on CNN, on FOX, to get it on headline news, to get it on the local news? Because you can send it to the news people — and I’m sorry, I’m rambling — like I have —
THE PRESIDENT: So was I, though, for an hour. (Laughter.)

Q: — can you use this, and it will just end up in a drawer, because it’s good, it portrays the good. And if people could see that, if the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict.

Bush came back with coo-noise about the importance of a free press.  

No Good News

There’s no way of proving whether administration stage managers gave this woman in West Virginia a script, or if she’s fallen under the spell of the “no good news” mantra.  That she clumped CNN and FOX together could have been part of FOX’s “fair and balanced” brainwash strategy, or it may be that the woman honestly can’t see what FOX News is really all about.  

Whatever the case may be, the designed message got out.  Whatever criticism of Bush and the war in Iraq that appears in the media is unfair, but Bush is a good old guy who just lets that kind of thing roll off his back.  

That an outlet like MSNBC ran the clip multiple times goes to show just how severely the mainstream media has allowed itself to be cowed by Rove’s liberal press bashing strategy.

It may be that MSNBC ran the clip because the West Virginia woman didn’t mention them as part of the “no good news” network.  And comments made by MSNBC’s Don Imus in the last two days may support that theory.

On Wednesday, Imus castigated White House press corps stalwart Helen Thomas for being disrespectful to Mister Bush during the previous day’s press conference.  What journalistic sin had Helen committed?  She asked Bush why he’d decided to invade Iraq, and persisted in seeking a straight answer to her question when Bush didn’t give her one.  

Imagine, flaying a journalist for asking the president of the United States the most critical political question of our day and insisting on a coherent reply.  You’d think that sort of thing should be encouraged, not condemned.  The last thing America needs is for one media icon to blast another one for holding a politician’s feet to the fire.  

Imus continued to echo the “no good news” mantra today when he slapped around MSNBC’s Iraq correspondent Richard Engel for the media’s lack of reporting stories favorable to the administration’s agenda.  To his credit, Engel held his ground and stood up to Imus’s assertions, and did so in a way that showed more respect and dignity than Imus and Mister Bush combined deserve.  Young Engel, by the way, is the only television network news correspondent to have covered the entire Iraq War II from Baghdad.  

What’s Fair or Balanced About “Fair and Balanced?”

As CBS journalist and commentator Andy Rooney said in 2000:

The trouble with news now is money. Most of the decisions being made in television news are not about news, they’re about money. Corporate America was late discovering there was profit to be made with news, and it’s trying to make up for its slow start…

I wish someone fabulously wealthy like Bill Gates would buy a network and say to the news department: ‘Here’s a couple of billion dollars a year. Do it right. I’m not going to interfere. I’ll get my money back from the entertainment division.

The bad news, perhaps, is that in the 2006 24/7 news network environment, news and entertainment are the same thing.  The outrageous absurdities portrayed in the 1976 film Network are readily accepted complacencies in the contemporary information age.

If criticism of itself will lead to ratings and profits, the mainstream media will more than happily tout it, even if that leads to abject loss of objectivity in the pursuit of ratings and readership enjoyed by Rush, the lowbrow Bill (O’Reilley), the high brow Bill (Buckley), the in-between Bill (Kristol), Ann, Laura, Shawn, Neil, Cal, Tom, Suzanne, Gordon, Pat…

Just once, I’d like to see a Murrow or Cronkite class journalist stand up and say something like this:

You’ve heard a lot lately about how the mainstream media doesn’t report enough of the good news about Iraq.  As a prominent figure in the mainstream media, I will freely admit to you that assertion is true.  Let my tell you why.

Being “fair and balanced” isn’t about giving equal weight to all sides of a story, and certainly not about the story of a war.  The truth is that there’s no amount of good news about our woebegone excursion in Iraq or our equally misfired Global War on Terror that balances or justifies the bad news about them.

I for one am happy to know that little girls in Afghanistan are going to school.  But I’m unconvinced that that compensates for the fact that the Taliban have made a comeback in that country, or that subsequent to our incursion in Afghanistan it has become the world’s leading exporter of heroin, or that one of its citizens currently faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity.  

I am also happy to know that electrical power, clean water, and other services are being restored in some portions of Iraq.  But there’s no clear evidence that these quality of life utilities have improved over the levels they existed at during Saddam Hussein’s regime, or even come back up to those levels.  And even the Bush administration has yet to claim that we invaded Iraq for the purpose of improving its peoples’ hygiene and indoor climate control.

In the meantime, Iraq, the Middle East, and the rest of the world are less stable than they were before we invaded Iraq.  

If, as an American citizen, you wish to be presented with a view of your world distorted through a thick, rose-colored lens, please exercise your freedom to patronize a news outlet other than this one.

If a major media source puts out a message like that, we might just get our republic back.

What are the odds?

Good night and good luck.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his daily commentaries at Pen and Sword and ePluripus Media.