Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 360 Editor's Choice: 12
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The market
[Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So many times when media outlets get pegged as being irresponsible, they pass it off as "The Market" deciding.
Walter Issacson apparently made it clear in the Moyers documentary just who the "Market" is.
WALTER ISAACSON: We'd put it on the air and by nature of a 24 hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.
BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?
WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'
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And now, Mike Allen
[Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So Allen has a piece in TIME about Edwards rejecting the Global War on Terror phrase as propaganda.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1616724,00.html
"This political language [GWOT] has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do," Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. "It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true."
This is a refreshing point of view. It also has the virtue of being true. There is no global war on terror. The US is engaged in an occupation in Iraq that has nothing to do with terrorism, and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan that also has nothing to do with terrorism. The actions taken against terror attacks have been arrests in Saudi Arabia and in the UK. These were not military actions.
So how does Allen close his piece?
"What they have proven beyond any doubt is that the exercise of raw power does not make you a leader," Edwards said. He stated he doesn't know why the other top-tier Democrats didn't join him in boycotting GWOT, but added: "My conjecture is that they've used the term so many times themselves that they would be concerned about saying that they reject it now. And they're also concerned about the political implications. I'm going to say the truth, and that's it."
But the truth is that the war on terror is destined to outlast a change in the Oval Office — or in vocabulary.
So the "truth" is that Edwards is wrong, that this is not a subject of valid discussion, and that Mike Allen has told us so.
Injecting an editorial opinion in this piece is simply unacceptable.
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This is actually frightening
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This seems to be serious. They really think that shouting slogans is all that's necessary. It's like the Bush administration's approach cubed--just say how you wish the world would be, and then that's what it will be.
Win? What in heavens name does that mean in this context? In practice, it means an indefinite occupation with sovereignty retained by the US, unending sectarian strife and thousands of Iraqis killed every month. It's unfortunate that there is no opportunity to ask these people what they mean by "winning."
But I suppose that's intentional.
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Josh's piece
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul Dirks' link to Josh Marshall's discussion of what went wrong is really valuable. For me, this is the money quote:
This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region.
The Mission was in fact the establishment of a US proxy state in the middle east. The neo-cons idiotically believed that they could jam in their favorite exiles and also maintain the illusion of elected government by a complex, tiered voting scheme.
But the extreme unpopularity of the exiles, combined with al Sistani calling their bluff on democratic elections meant that the government that was elected was both ineffectually fragmented and hardly committed to being a proxy state for the US goals of defending Israel and counterbalancing Shi-ite Iraq.
That Mission was never openly stated, so now we're left with bizarre abstract formulations like Frist's.
Josh goes on to say:
It's often been noted that we've had a difficult time explaining or figuring out just who we're fighting in Iraq. Is it the Sunni irreconcilables? Or is it Iran and its Shi'a proxies? Or is it al Qaida? The confusion is not incidental but fundamental. We can't explain who we're fighting because this isn't a war, like most, where the existence of a particular enemy or specific danger dictates your need to fight. We're occupying Iraq because continuing to do so allows us to pretend that the initial plan wasn't completely misguided and a mistake. If we continue to run the place a bit longer, the reasoning goes, we'll root out this or that problem that is preventing our original predictions from coming to pass. And of course the longer the occupation continues we generate more and more embittered foes to frame this rationalization around, thus creating an perpetual feedback loop of calamity and self-justification.
The reason the wingnut war supporters can't state a victory condition is that the real condition for victory--a pliant client state in Iraq--is not ever going to happen. The US can, of course, remain an occupying force, but to do so effectively would require a draft, which will never happen. So what's left is a deteriorating stasis with the remaining deadenders in the US shouting out meaningless, contentless slogans instead of facing reality.